The Final Reckoning
Sam Bourne
From the author of Number One bestseller The Righteous Men. How are hundreds of unexplained deaths, spanning the globe, connected to the last great secret of the Second World War?Tom Byrne has fallen from grace since his days as an idealistic young lawyer in New York. Now he'll work for anyone – as long as the money's right.So when the United Nations call him in to do their dirty work, he accepts the job without hesitation. A suspected suicide bomber shot by UN security staff has turned out to be a harmless old man: Tom must placate the family and limit their claims for compensation.In London, Tom meets the dead man’s alluring daughter, Rebecca, and learns that her father was not quite the innocent he seemed. He unravels details of a unique, hidden brotherhood, united in a mission that has spanned the world and caused hundreds of unexplained deaths.Pursued by those ready to kill to uncover the truth, Tom has to unlock a secret that has lain buried for more than 60 years – the last great secret of the Second World War.
SAM BOURNE
The Final Reckoning
Table of Contents
The Final Reckoning (#u9d6cc3bb-b8d5-54b4-9510-c713f58d7946)
Prologue (#u68a607fb-be94-5528-a2cb-7fb416bbf5be)
Chapter One (#ucacdbb89-0237-514d-9a57-83cc93de8c7d)
Chapter Two (#ubac2d683-954d-5261-b07d-f76935d2d8ea)
Chapter Three (#u1b9db6db-db73-590d-ac68-f45a0c8fd35a)
Chapter Four (#ue129c18d-4f25-59aa-baea-37d2f81474bd)
Chapter Five (#u125ffddf-9fba-5e5e-aa1d-eee9e1d3a406)
Chapter Six (#u33596936-8361-56b2-843a-1098bc29cc3c)
Chapter Seven (#u35e1048f-d80a-5f33-9e95-c58db8161a45)
Chapter Eight (#ua427e999-c394-5ef8-b43f-18b34f18b60a)
Chapter Nine (#u3e1dd8d8-2290-5196-972a-adc7d23db28f)
Chapter Ten (#u9f28f7e9-c094-52ce-92d2-02390158b433)
Chapter Eleven (#ua25572c6-8412-5cfb-b6ad-91fd9b0e7725)
Chapter Twelve (#ue2c6b9ba-f2ff-5d3d-a76c-d9c3690fab22)
Chapter Thirteen (#u4fd7d3c2-fd8b-5760-9b40-933c0db89a30)
Chapter Fourteen (#u89e5ed32-84d9-5a65-a8da-ed1f2491f1fe)
Chapter Fifteen (#udb45dfaa-06e8-53a9-a64b-669a84e82b02)
Chapter Sixteen (#ucd432225-d557-5dde-88e5-bc98ae21255a)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Author's Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
By Sam Bourne (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE FINAL RECKONING (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
Sam Bourne is the pseudonym of Jonathan Freedland, an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. He has written a weekly column for the Guardian since 1997, having previously served as the paper's Washington correspondent.
In the annual What the Papers Say Awards of 2002 Jonathan Freedland was named Columnist of the Year. His first novel, The Righteous Men, was chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read in 2006 and hit Number One on the Sunday Times bestseller list. His second novel, The Last Testament, was a top ten bestseller and has sold over 250,000 copies in the UK alone. He lives in London with his wife and their two children.
For Sarah: Ani l'dodi, v'dodi li.
PROLOGUE (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
My pen has hovered over these pages many times. I have wanted so badly to set down my story here – but I have hesitated. Each time I begin a sentence only to pull back. Even now the pen is heavy in my hand.
But there is not much time, I see that now. I understand that if I were to leave these pages blank, all that I have witnessed would be forgotten. Our story would be lost forever.
So forgive me if what you read here is harsh, if it haunts you the way it haunts me. But there will be no exaggeration, no lies. I may not tell everything, but what I will tell will be the truth. This is what happened. Some of it you know already. Some of it you don't. It is my story now, but soon it will be yours.
CHAPTER ONE (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
The day that changes a life, or ends a life, rarely comes with a warning. There are no signs in the sky, no dark ravens on a post, no soundtrack in a minor key. To Felipe Tavares, security officer at the United Nations building in New York, September 23 had started as a regular Monday.
He had come in on the Long Island Expressway on the 6.15 train, picked up a cappuccino and a muffin – a skinny blueberry one, in a concession to his wife – waved his permit at the guys on the door and headed to the basement of the United Nations building, headquarters of the institution he had served for the previous three years. There he opened up his locker, pulled out the blue uniform of an officer of the UN Security Force, complete with the Sam Browne belt and the brass badge that still triggered a charge of pride, and dressed for his shift.
Next, he went to the armoury to pick up his weapon. He handed over his smartcard photo ID, taking in return a 9mm Glock, standard issue for most serving members of this miniature police force, charged with protecting the international territory that was the UN compound and everything within it. Felipe took the ammunition from the pouch on his belt and loaded up, carefully pointing the weapon into the loading barrel to guard against any misfires. Once his gun was holstered on his belt, alongside his truncheon, a P38 baton with handle, pepper spray and cuffs, he headed for the basement's ‘ready room’. There he would stand in his place for the line-up, where he and his fellow guards would be reviewed by an officer, checking to make sure his men and women were tidy, sober and fit for duty.
That done, he headed back to the main entrance on First Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets to begin what he assumed would be another long day checking permits and answering tourists' questions. It was warm enough, but rain was in the air; he put on his orange-and-black waterproof cape. The work would be boring, but he did not care. Felipe Tavares had yearned to escape from the drudgery of small-town Portugal where he had been born and grown up, and where, if he had not moved fast, he would have died – and he had made it. He was in New York City and that alone was excitement enough.
* * *
At that same moment, across town in a Tribeca side street that was no more than an alley, Marcus Mack conducted his own morning routine. African-American and in his late twenties, wearing loose, frayed jeans, with a full head of dreadlocks and with a grungy Crumpler computer bag slung across his shoulder, he checked on his parked car. Anyone watching would have assumed he was merely proud of his souped-up, if aged, Pontiac and that when he knelt down by the driver's side rear wheel he was checking the tyre pressure. They probably wouldn't have seen him feeling in the well above the wheel and finding, stuck there with duct tape, a cellphone. He took it and walked on.
Perhaps a minute later the phone rang, as Marcus knew it would. The voice that spoke was familiar but Marcus knew better than to say hello. It said four words – ‘Athens coffee shop, seven-thirty’ – then hung up. At the corner of the street, and without ceremony, Mack dropped the telephone into a garbage can.
The café was full, the way his handler liked it. Marcus spotted him instantly, on a stool in the window, just another grey-suit reading his newspaper. Marcus took the seat next to him and pulled out his laptop. They made no eye contact.
The handler's phone rang and he pretended to answer it. In fact, he was speaking to Marcus, whose eyes remained fixed on the computer screen in front of him.
‘We've picked up activity in Brighton Beach. The Russian.’
He did not have to say any more. Marcus knew about the Russian, as did the other member of his unit in the NYPD Intelligence Division. The Russian was an arms supplier who had been spotted a year ago. The Division had enough to shut him down immediately but the order had come from on high: ‘Keep him in play.’ It was a familiar tactic. Leave a bad guy in business, watch who comes and goes and hope he leads you to some worse guys. Throw back the minnow, catch the shark.
‘Surveillance camera caught a man in black entering the Russian's place last night, leaving an hour later. Traced him to the Tudor Hotel, 42nd and Second.’
Marcus did not react, just kept tapping away at his keyboard, for all the world an urban guy reshuffling his iTunes collection. But he knew what the location meant. The Tudor was perhaps the nearest hotel to the United Nations building. And this was the UN's big week. Heads of government from all over the world had piled into New York to address the General Assembly. US Secret Service were crawling all over the place in preparation for the President's visit later in the week, but there were more than a hundred other prize targets already here, all jammed within a few Manhattan blocks for seventy-two fraught hours. In a week like this, anything was possible. A Kurd bent on assassinating the head of the Turkish government, a Basque separatist determined to blast the Spanish prime minister, ideally on live television: you name it.
‘Placed a tap on the Tudor Hotel switchboard last night. Recorded a guest calling down to reception this morning, asking about visiting times to the UN. “Is it true tourists can go right into the Security Council chamber itself?”’
‘Accent?’ It was the first word Marcus had spoken.
‘Part British, part “foreign”.’
‘OK’
‘You need to get down there. Watch and follow.’
‘Description?’
‘White male. Five-eight. Heavy black coat, black woollen hat.’
‘Weight?’
‘Hard to tell. Coat's bulky.’
‘Back-up?’
‘There's a team.’
Felipe Tavares was now outdoors. Behind him was the temporary white marquee that served as the UN visitors' lobby – still up after five years. Not much tourist traffic yet, too early. So far it was just regular UN staff, permits dangling like necklaces. Not much for him to do. He looked up at the sky, now darkening. Rain was coming.
* * *
Marcus stationed himself on the corner of 42nd and Second Avenue – still called Nelson and Winnie Mandela Corner – tucked into the doorway of McFadden's Bar. Diagonally opposite was the Tudor Hotel. The first drops of rain were a help; the shelter gave him an excuse to be standing there, doing nothing. And it meant the Tudor's doorman, in cape and peaked cap, was too busy fussing with umbrellas and cab doors to notice a shifty guy in dreads across the street.
That was how Marcus liked it; to be unnoticed. It had become a speciality of his back when he was doing undercover work in the NYPD's narcotics squad. Since he had moved over to the Intel Division a year ago it had become a necessity. The thousand men and women of what amounted to New York's very own spy agency, a legacy of 9/11, kept themselves secret from everyone: the public, the bad guys, even their fellow cops.
He had been waiting twenty-five minutes when he saw it. A blur of black emerging through the hotel's revolving door. Just as it turned towards him, the doorman stepped forward with his umbrella, blocking Marcus's view of the man's face. By the time the umbrella was out of the way, the blur of black had turned right. In the direction of the UN.
Marcus spoke into what those around him would have believed was a Bluetooth headset for a cellphone. ‘Subject on the move.’
Without waiting for a response he started walking, keeping a few paces behind the man on the other side of the six, traffic-filled lanes of 42nd Street. A voice crackled into his ear, sounding distant. ‘Do we have a positive ID?’
Marcus shot another look. The man was swaddled in the thick, dark coat the handler had mentioned; his head was covered in a black woollen hat pulled low, and he was no more than five feet and eight inches tall. The subject matched perfectly the description of the man seen at the Russian's last night. He pressed the button clipped to his sleeve: ‘Affirmative. We have a positive ID.’
Suddenly the man in black began to turn, as if checking for a tail. Of course he would: trained terrorists didn't just let themselves get followed. Marcus swivelled quickly, switching his gaze to the steps that led up to a small city playground. In his peripheral vision he could tell the subject was no longer looking at him, but was marching onwards.
Something about the man's gait struck Marcus as odd. Was he limping slightly? There was a restriction to his movements, something slowing him down. He walked like a man carrying a heavy weight.
Suddenly the East River came into view. They had reached the corner of First Avenue: UN Plaza was visible. The rain was getting heavier now, making it harder to see.
The man in black had reached the crossroads, the traffic heavy. Marcus hung back on his side of the street, all the while keeping his eye fixed on the subject, who had now stopped by the first entrance to the United Nations, reading the sign: ‘Staff, Delegates and Residents. Correspondents Only.’ Now the subject moved on, separated by the black iron railings from a procession of flagpoles, each one empty. Further back loomed the trademark curve of glass and steel that was the UN headquarters.
Marcus cursed his short leather jacket, feeble against this downpour. He pulled his collar up to stop the rain running down his neck. The man in black seemed untroubled by the weather. He moved past another UN gate, this one for cars, and another green-tinted sentry box.
Marcus stopped for a moment in the doorway of the Chase Bank. The second he did so an oversized tourist bus – doubtless full of oversized tourists – pulled up into the slip road that fronted the UN between 45th and 46th.
‘Lost visual, lost visual!’ Marcus urged into his mouthpiece.
‘I got it,’ said another voice over the air, instant and calm. ‘Subject has halted outside main gate.’
Marcus walked on, trying to get ahead of the tourist bus without revealing himself. His headset crackled again.
‘Subject back on the move.’ OK, thought Marcus with relief. A false alarm. The man in black was not trying to enter the UN building after all.
At last the bus pulled out, giving Marcus a clear view of the subject, now walking further down First Avenue. His pace was quickening slightly, thanks to the steep downward slope. But this was no relaxed stroll. Marcus could see him studying the garden on the other side of the railings intently. He had drawn level with a large, heroic sculpture – the slaying of a dragon, the beast apparently fashioned out of an old artillery cannon – and stopped as if looking for something.
Marcus squinted. Was he searching for another, unguarded, way into the UN compound? If he was, he clearly had not found it. Now, with renewed purpose, the man turned around, heading back towards the main entrance.
Felipe Tavares' radio was bulky, low-tech and in this rain barely audible. It was hard to separate the static crackle from the rest of the noise. But the word ‘Alert’ came through clear enough, especially when repeated twice.
‘Watch Commander to main entry points, this is the Watch Commander to main entry points.’ Felipe recognized the accent: the guy from the Ivory Coast who'd started three months ago. ‘We have information on a possible threat to the building. Suspect is male, five foot eight, wearing a heavy black coat and dark woollen hat. No more details at present, but stay vigilant. Please stop and apprehend anyone fitting that description.’
Felipe had barely digested the message when he saw a blur of black striding, head down, towards the gate he was guarding.
Marcus was now halfway across First Avenue, struggling to hear the voice in his ear above the traffic.
‘… enter the UN compound. Repeat, agents are not to enter the UN compound.’
He stopped as he reached the kerb of the slip road, now just yards away from the man he had followed for more than ten minutes, and watched him walk briskly through the gate and up the few steps to the small piazza in front of the white marquee. He had crossed into UN territory: he was now officially beyond reach. All Marcus could see was the man's back. He felt his heart fill with dread.
From this angle, at the side of the piazza, Felipe could only see a little of the man's face in profile, the hat and the collar of his coat obscuring even that. But he fitted the Watch Commander's description perfectly.
Felipe watched him stop, as if contemplating what stood before him. Then he took three more paces forwards, then stopped again. What was he doing?
The security man could feel his palms growing moist. He was suddenly aware of how many people were around, dozens of them crossing between him and this black-coated figure. So many people. He wondered if he should say something into his radio, but all he could do was stare, frozen, his gaze fixed on the coat. It was raining, but it was certainly not cold. Why was the coat so thick, so heavy? Answering his own question spread a wave of nausea through him, starting in his stomach and rising into his throat.
Felipe looked around, desperate to see half a dozen of his fellow officers descending on this scene, men who by their very presence would take the decision for him. He wanted to use his radio – ‘Believe suspect could be armed with a bomb. Repeat, believe suspect could be armed with a bomb!’ – but what if that only provoked him to act? Felipe Tavares was paralysed.
The man was on the move again, now just yards away from the marquee. Felipe thought that perhaps he should wait, let him go through the doors and be stopped by Security. He wouldn't stand a chance: he'd never get past the detectors or a frisk. But he wouldn't care. That, Felipe realized as the blood drained from his head, was the absolute horror of it. Nothing could scare this man.
Now the subject changed course again, still showing his back to Felipe, but turning to face the street. Felipe wanted to cry out, demand that the man freeze and put his hands in the air. But that, he understood, could be no less fatal. Once the man knew he'd been discovered, he would push the button immediately, right here. And there were just so many people around …
Felipe did not decide to do it. That much he would remember later: there was never a decision. He simply reached for his gun. And at that moment he saw ahead of him, through the black iron railings, two men, one of them young, black and dreadlocked, both raising their hands, showing their palms, as if in surrender. The sheer alarm on their faces, the mortal panic etched on them, settled it for him. In a single motion, he pulled out his weapon and aimed it squarely at the man in black.
The next moment was one Felipe Tavares would replay over and over until his last breath, usually in slow-motion. For the rest of his life, it would be the last image he would see at night and the first when he woke up each morning. It would sear itself behind his eyelids. At the centre of it were the faces of those two men. They were aghast, not just frightened but shocked by what they had seen. One of them shouted the single word: No!
Felipe was certain what had happened. The man in black had obviously undone his coat, revealing the explosive vest underneath. The two men, on the other side of the railings, had seen that he was about to blow himself up. The sound of that cry, the look of horror on the dreadlocked man's face, coursed through Felipe, sending a charge of electricity down his right arm and into his finger. He squeezed the trigger once, twice, and watched the man collapse at the knees, falling slowly, even gracefully, like a chimney stack detonated from below.
Felipe couldn't move. He was fixed to the spot, his arms locked into position, still aiming at the man now lying in a heap no more than five yards before him.
He heard nothing for a while. Not the echo of the gunshots. Not the cries, as the crowd scattered like pigeons. Not the alarm that had been set off inside the UN building.
The first voice he heard was that of a fellow officer, who had dashed out of the marquee at the sound of gunfire. She now stood over the corpse, repeating the same word over and over, ‘No. No. No.’
Unsteadily, dumbly, Felipe walked over to the pile of black clothes now ringed by a spreading puddle of blood. And, in an instant, he understood. There, at his feet, was not the body of a suicide bomber. There was no explosive vest filling that jacket. All it had contained was the flesh and bone of a man, now broken and unmoving. Felipe could even see why he had been wearing a heavy coat in September. He understood it all and the horror of it made his knees buckle.
Felipe Tavares, and the growing crowd of security officers now circling him, were all looking at the same thing.
The corpse of a white-haired and very old man.
CHAPTER TWO (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
There was a moment, lasting perhaps two beats, of silence and then the noise erupted. There were screams of course – a man first, yelping in a language few around him understood – and then the cries of three women who had been posing for a photograph by the Pop Art sculpture of a gun, its barrel twisted into a knot. They had fallen to the ground, their larynxes temporarily stopped in fright, but now their fear pealed as loud as church bells. Soon there was crying, shouting and the sound, just audible, of a man contemplating the shard of human bone that had landed at his feet, murmuring in his own tongue, ‘Good God’.
Some in the marquee began to panic; one sounded the fire alarm. The rest remembered the drill they had practised. They abandoned their posts at the scanning machines, rushing to stand like sentries at the doors of each entrance, their pistols brandished. The United Nations headquarters was going into lockdown.
Felipe Tavares was now flanked by two colleagues, guiding him away from the corpse which lay, still uncovered and untouched, on the ground. Tavares was talking feverishly, babbling about the men he had seen at the gate, describing the horror on their faces – but when his fellow officers looked, they could see no one.
The noise soon got much louder. Less than ninety seconds after the shooting, the first of forty NYPD squad cars converged on UN Plaza, their lights flashing, their sirens wailing: this was the ‘surge’ they had practised nearly a dozen times since 9/11, the full might of the New York Police Department rapidly converging on a single spot. Several cars disgorged SWAT teams, the men, their flesh buttressed in Kevlar, armed with assault rifles, charging forward like GIs storming a Normandy beach. Soon they ringed the entire UN perimeter, their guns trained on the terrified men and women within.
First Avenue was free of traffic now, thanks to the NYPD officers armed with 50mm machine guns who had sealed the road from both north and south, 30th Street all the way to 59th. The UN headquarters now sat in the centre of a ‘sterile zone’ thirty blocks long. Since First Avenue was a main artery for the eastern half of Manhattan, New York City was about to seize up.
In the air, four NYPD Agusta A119 helicopters equipped with high-resolution, thermal-imaging ‘super-spy’ cameras now hovered, together policing an impromptu no-fly zone over the entire area. At the same time, on the East River, police launches took off from their bases in Throgs Neck, Brooklyn and along the Queens shoreline. No one would be able to enter or escape the United Nations compound by air or by water.
Not much later, the NYPD's Chief of Detectives arrived with his own lights and sirens. To his pleasure, he had got there ahead of Charles ‘Chuck’ Riley, the Police Commissioner, whose motorcade and motorcycle outriders pulled up a few moments later. Both nodded with satisfaction as they observed a lockdown utterly complete. As their aides would brief reporters for the rest of the day, there had been a suspected terror attack on one of the city's ‘high value targets’ and New York had responded ‘with swift and deadly force’.
But as they stepped out of their cars and shook hands with each other, the two men instantly saw the nature of their problem. They could approach the now-locked steel gate of the UN but go no further. They had reached the limit of the NYPD's authority, the very boundary of United States sovereignty. They were able to look into the eyes of the two men on the door, one a policeman from Montenegro, the other from Belgium. The Commissioner was sure he could see their hands trembling.
Inside, on the thirty-fourth floor, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs heard the fire alarm before he heard anything else. Henning Munchau leapt to his feet. He checked his outer office: nobody there, too early. He called down to front desk security but the phone just rang and rang. He checked his window, wondering for a moment if he was about to see a 747 steaming through the air, larger and lower than it should be, about to pierce the glass skin of the UN headquarters, killing the eight thousand people who worked within as well as a good number of the world's heads of government.
It was only then that his deputy, a Brazilian, rushed in, the blood absent from his face. He struggled to speak, and not just because he was out of breath. ‘Henning, I think you need to come right away.’
Eighteen minutes after Felipe Tavares had fired his fatal shot, Henning Munchau was standing close to the lifeless body that had still not been touched, save for the waterproof cape placed over it. The rain was still coming down.
At his side stood the Under-Secretary-General for Safety and Security, stunned into silence. Both had just received an instant briefing, giving them the roughest outline of what had happened. Munchau saw the discotheque of lights that now ringed the UN compound and the small army of NYPD men that surrounded it and felt like the inhabitant of a medieval castle on the first day of a siege.
And now he could see, standing on the other side of the railings, a face he recognized, one rarely off the front page of the city papers, the man they called ‘The Commish’. This was one legal conference that would have to take place outside, on foot and in the rain.
‘Commissioner, I am Henning Munchau, chief lawyer of the United Nations.’
‘Good to meet ya, Henning,’ the Commissioner said, his face and tone conveying nothing of the sort. ‘We appear to have a situation.’
‘We do.’
‘We cannot enter these premises and respond to this incident unless you formally request that we do so.’ The language was officialese, the accent down-home Southern.
‘Looks like you've already responded in quite a big way, Commissioner.’ Though German, Munchau spoke his eerily fluent English with a hint of Australian, both accent and idiom, the legacy, so UN legend had it, of his service in the UN mission in East Timor.
Riley shrugged. ‘We cannot enter the compound without your consent. And I'm assuming you don't have the resources to handle a terrorist incident.’
Henning tried to hide his relief. It meant the NYPD had not yet heard about the dead man. That would give him time.
‘You're quite right,’ Munchau said, struck by the strangeness of speaking through metal railings in the rain, like an outdoor prison visit. He envied the Commissioner his umbrella. ‘But I think we need to agree some terms.’
The policeman smiled wanly. ‘Go ahead.’
‘The NYPD come in but only at the request and at the discretion of the United Nations.’
‘No discretion. Once you let us in, it's our investigation. All or nothing.’
‘Fine, but none of this.’ He gestured towards the SWAT teams, their guns cocked. ‘This is not the UN way. This is not Kabul.’ Munchau saw Riley bristle, so he went further. ‘This is not Baghdad.’
‘OK, minimal show of force.’
‘I'm talking one or two armed men only, to accompany your detectives.’
‘Done.’
‘And your investigation to be shadowed at all times by a representative of the UN.’
‘A representative?’
‘A lawyer. From my team.’
‘A lawyer? For Christ's—’
‘Those are the conditions.’
Munchau saw the Commissioner weigh it up, knowing he could hardly refuse. A suspected terror attack in New York, the NYPD had to be involved. ‘The Commish’ couldn't go on television saying that the department was sitting this one out, whatever the explanation. Munchau knew that: Riley would want to be on the air within the hour, reassuring New Yorkers that he had it all under control.
Now a black limo pulled up, with a whole new battalion of lights and sirens. Behind it were two satellite TV trucks, clearly given special permission to come through. The Mayor had arrived.
‘OK,’ the Commissioner said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘I accept.’
Munchau offered his hand through the railings and the policeman took it hurriedly. Munchau nodded to the UN guard on the gate, who fumbled with the lock until it opened.
Watching the TV reporter heading his way, Munchau made a point of raising his voice to declare, ‘Mr Commissioner, welcome to the United Nations.’
CHAPTER THREE (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
It took time for the Chef de Cabinet of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to convene this meeting. Besides Munchau and his counterpart in Security, the UN's most senior officials, the rest of the elite quintet of USGs – Under-Secretaries-General – had been on their way to the building when the shooting happened. (The UN high command tended to work late, but did not start especially early.) Thanks to the shutdown of First Avenue, none reached UN Plaza much before ten a.m.
Now, at last, they were gathered in the Situation Center. The more cynical folk in the building always cracked a smile at that name. Built in the aftermath of 9/11, this heavily armoured, lavishly equipped and top secret meeting place was clearly modelled on the legendary Situation Room of the White House. But of course the UN could not be seen to be aping the Americans: the United States' many enemies in the UN would not tolerate that. Nor could the Americans be allowed to believe that the UN Secretary-General was getting ideas above his station, imagining himself a match for the President of the United States. So the UN would have no Sit Room, but a Sit Center, which made all the difference.
At its heart was a solid, polished table, each place around it equipped discreetly with the sockets and switches that made all forms of communication, including simultaneous translation, possible. Facing the table was a wall fitted with state-of-the-art video conferencing facilities: half a dozen wide plasma screens that could be hooked up rapidly by satellite, across secure links, to UN missions around the globe. The Secretary-General was never on the road for less than a third of the year, but the existence of the Sit Center meant that he did not always have to leave New York if he wanted face-to-face talks with his own people. Above all, it was there for when disaster struck.
There had been no need for video links this time: the danger was right here in New York. The Chef de Cabinet, Finnish like his boss, began by explaining that the building remained in partial lockdown, with authorized access and egress only. No one would be let in or out without the express permission of the Legal Counsel. That had been agreed with the New York Police Department who wished to interview every witness, even if that meant interviewing the entire UN workforce.
The Chef de Cabinet went on to confirm that the Secretary-General himself had not been inside UN Plaza at the time. He had been at a breakfast at the Four Seasons held in his honour and was now heading over through horrendous traffic. He had told his audience that he had made a deliberate decision to continue with his planned engagement, that to do otherwise would be ‘to hand a victory to those who seek to disrupt our way of life’. Apparently that had elicited an ovation, but it made Henning Munchau wince. Not only because it felt like a crude pander to New Yorkers, echoing their own post-9/11 rhetoric of defiance, and not only because he reckoned it would have been smarter politics for the new Secretary-General to have stood with his own people as they appeared to come under attack, but largely because the SG had now opened up a gap between public perception of the morning's incident – a terrorist outrage, bravely thwarted – and what Henning knew to be the reality.
The Chef de Cabinet explained that technicians were trying to connect the SG via speakerphone.
‘In the meantime, I suggest we establish what we know and work out some options that we can present to the Secretary-General. Can I start with you, Henri?’
The Under-Secretary responsible for the security of UN personnel across the globe glanced down at the note he had hastily written when being briefed by the Watch Commander, translating from his own handwritten French.
‘We understand that a man was shot at 8.51 a.m. today by a member of the UN's Security and Safety Force in front of the main visitors' entrance between 45th and 46th Streets. He had been monitored by a team from the NYPD Intelligence Division who had been in liaison with ourselves and they had cause to believe he posed an imminent danger to the United Nations. That information was passed to the Watch Commander and he passed it onto the guards on duty, including the officer who fired his weapon, believing the man to be a suicide bomber.’
‘And the man is dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what else do we know? Is the building in any danger?’
‘The lockdown procedure was followed perfectly. The building is now secure. We have no reason to believe this was the start of a series of attacks.’
‘And why is that?’
Henri Barr hesitated. He looked over at Henning, who gave a small nod. ‘Because we strongly suspect that the man killed does not match the profile put together by the NYPD.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’ It was the USG for humanitarian affairs, a white South African ex-communist who had made his name in the anti-apartheid movement. His bullshit detector was famously robust.
‘It means that the man who was shot was old.’
‘Old?’
‘Yes, he was a very old man.’ Barr lost oxygen at the end of the sentence and gulped. ‘But his clothes fitted the description and they seemed to be the clothes of a suicide bomber.’
‘Oh come on. He was dressed like a suicide bomber and that's why we killed him?’
The Chef de Cabinet stepped in. This was no time for grandstanding or arguments, though he could feel the adrenalin rising in the room. ‘When you say “old”, Henri, what do you mean?’
‘We estimate maybe seventy, perhaps more.’
‘Did he even look Muslim?’ It was the question that several of them had wanted to ask but had not dared. But Anjhut Banerjee, the Indian Under-Secretary for Peacekeeping, had none of their inhibitions.
‘No,’ said Barr, looking down at his notes. ‘It seems not.’
‘Good God,’ Banerjee said, falling back into her chair. ‘You do know what this means, don't you?’ she said, looking directly at the Chef de Cabinet. ‘I was in London when the police shot some Brazilian electrician on a train because they thought he looked like a suicide bomber. Completely innocent man.’ She exhaled sharply, shorthand for ‘You have no idea the shit that is coming our way’.
‘What is our vulnerability, Henning?’ The Chef de Cabinet looking towards the lawyer.
‘You mean our liability?’
‘Yes.’
‘We can look into that, but I don't think we should get too hung up on compensation claims and the like. That's not the nature of the problem.’ He paused, forcing the man at the head of the table to press him.
‘What is the nature of the problem, then?’ ‘Same as with most legal problems in this place. It's not legal. It's political.’
‘So what do you suggest we do about it?’
‘I think I know exactly what needs to be done. And, better still, I know just the man to do it.’
CHAPTER FOUR (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
Tom Byrne was jolted awake by a sound both unfamiliar and unpleasant. These days if he ever set the alarm, he used the iPod docked in his Bose bedside player, waking up to the soothing welcome of a song from his own collection. Yesterday it had been Frank Sinatra, serenading the morning with I've Got You Under My Skin. What an improvement on how he used to begin his day, with the dreary drone of the BBC bloody World Service.
But this noise was worse than the radio. It was a repeating chime, with a long, echoing sustain, the sound lingering in the air. Tom could feel his heart thumping in his chest. And then he saw the culprit: his new BlackBerry, fresh out of the box just yesterday. He hadn't got around to setting it to silent.
He squinted at his watch. Half past ten in the morning. That was OK: he hadn't got to bed till five, having worked through the night on the Dubai contract. Then he remembered: he hadn't spent all night working.
‘Hey, Miranda. Wakey wakey.’
There was a groan from the pile of brunette hair resting on the pillow next to him, followed by a lift of the head and a grunt. ‘It's Marina.’
‘Sorry.’ Tom swung his legs out of the bed and headed over for the blinds, which he louvred open, flooding the room with light. ‘OK, Marina, I mean it. Rise and shine.’
The woman in the bed sat up, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. She didn't bother to cover herself, affording Tom a daytime view of the generous breasts he had been enjoying just a few hours earlier. Maybe young Upper West Side brunettes had their drawbacks, but right now he wasn't seeing any. Perhaps he could hop back into bed for another half hour …
The BlackBerry sounded again, a single high-volume chime to herald the arrival of a message. Bound to be his clients: he had sent them the first draft of the paperwork in the middle of the night, and here they were, already demanding revisions. You could say what you liked about organized crime, but you had to hand it to them: they worked long hours.
His new clients were what you'd call ‘a family of Italian-American descent with long and historic roots in the New York construction industry’ – that is if you were their lawyer. They were now seeking to expand into property in the Persian Gulf, all legal and legit, but there was a pile of international papers that had to be filed first. A friend of a friend had recommended him and the family were happy to have him – they liked being represented by a big-shot international lawyer, British-born and with several years at the United Nations on his resumé – and he was happy to have them, earning more in a week than he had earned in a year working for the blue-helmets of UN Plaza.
He watched as Marina slunk out of bed, nodding her in the direction of the shower, then looked back down at the BlackBerry. 1 Missed Call. He pressed it to see a single name displayed: Henning.
Now there was a surprise. Henning Munchau, Legal Counsel for the United Nations, hadn't called Tom from his personal cellphone all that often even when Tom worked for him. But that had been more than a year ago.
Tom would listen to the message first, before calling back – a habit picked up at the UN, an institution whose organizing principle could be boiled down to three little words: wait and see. His younger self had always been in such a hurry, but Tom had learned from the best that it paid to take your time, give yourself a moment to think, let the other guy show his hand first, even – especially – when the other guy was your boss. Or former boss. A few seconds' thinking time might make all the difference. Christ, the rule even applied to face-to-face conversations in that place. It was as if Harold Pinter had written the dialogue, the way UN officials would pause to read each other's expressions and divine their motivations.
‘Hi Tom, it's Henning. We need to talk. I know what you said about… Meet me at that coffee shop as fast as you can. Tom, I… don't call me back.’
Not even a ‘long time no speak’, the prick.
So the UN's most senior lawyer needed to discuss a topic so sensitive he didn't dare do it on the telephone or in his own building. That was hardly news: everyone knew there was not a word spoken in UN Plaza that was not monitored, by the Yanks at NSA, by the Brits at GCHQ and by God knows who else. But ‘meet me at the coffee shop’ was especially interesting. That meant Henning didn't even want to give away a specific location. And why on earth, given everything that had happened, had he called Tom? If it had been anyone else from the UN, Tom would have hit delete and not given it another thought. But this was Henning.
He walked into the closet, reviewing the line of suits arranged like conscripts on parade. Big meeting like this would normally call for the Prada or Paul Smith. But Tom didn't want to rub Henning's public sector salary in his face; he'd go for something plainer. Pink shirt and cufflinks? No, the plain blue would do. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: wrong side of forty, but he could still scrub up all right. No time for a shower today though. He shot two bursts of Hugo Boss aftershave onto his neck and mussed up his close-cropped, dirty blond hair.
The BlackBerry was now winking with the arrival of an email. Subject: Dubai. Sure enough, the Fantonis had been reading the small print. They'd noticed the legal obligation to pay compensation to the fishermen whose villages they were about to destroy to make way for a luxury high-rise development. ‘Can't we make this clause go away?’
Tom got ready to draft a reply that would explain the moral obligation on all developers to ensure that anybody rendered homeless would be adequately …
Fuck it. Using his thumbs, he typed: ‘Leave it to me: it's gone.’
He gathered up his things, admiring again the vast, open space of this loft apartment. He wondered about firing up the plasma TV, to check on the news but decided against it: Henning was waiting. Instead he poked his head around the bathroom door and called into the cloud of steam: ‘See yourself out, Miranda.’
CHAPTER FIVE (#u8d27c806-cdab-5283-89cf-7d9e3e5bed27)
The cab driver shook his turbaned head, muttering that he would get as far as he could, but the road had been blocked for the last hour. ‘On the radio, they say something about terror attack. You here on 9/11?’
Tom handed him a ten dollar bill and got out at 39th Street, walking as far as he could. He could see the clutch of police cars, their red lights winking, and behind them the glare of TV bulbs already illuminating a jam of trucks bearing satellite dishes. In itself that was no surprise during General Assembly week. He assumed the Russian tsar was in town – no point calling him anything else – or any one of the usual procession of African, Central Asian and Middle Eastern despots in New York for the glory of a stroll up to the podium of the General Assembly when they were lucky not to be in the dock at the Hague.
But now he could see a city cop, a woman, turning people back from the first entry gate to UN Plaza. Along the railings, stretching for several blocks, apparently encircling the entire compound like a ribbon on a Christmas gift, was a continuous thread of yellow-and-black plastic tape: POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS.
He walked on, noticing how each successive entrance was blocked off. The gate used by the public was thronged by a pack of reporters, photographers and cameramen. Tom was tall enough to peer over their heads, to see, in the middle of the paved area in front of the security marquee, a small tent constructed from green tarpaulin. Around it fussed police officers, a single photographer and a forensic team in overalls, masks and white latex gloves.
He crossed the road, threading his way through the cars. Facing him was the concrete phallic symbol that was the Trump World Tower and a skyscraper decorated with a damp and limp German flag: Deutschland's mission to the UN. The Nations' Café was just next door.
He saw Henning Munchau immediately, earnestly studying the map-of-the-world pattern that decorated the vinyl table top. Funny how easily men of power could be diminished. Inside the UN, Munchau was a player who could stride through corridors, winning deferential nods of the head from everyone he passed. But take him out of the building and he was just another New York suit with a briefcase and thinning hair.
To Tom's surprise, Henning rose the moment they had made eye contact, leaving his coffee untouched. His eyes indicated the door: follow me. What the hell was going on?
Once outside, Henning raised his eyebrows, a gesture Tom took a second or two to understand. ‘Of course,’ he said finally. Munchau was one of those smokers who never carried his own cigarettes: he believed that if you didn't buy them, you didn't really smoke them. Tom reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a pouch of Drum rolling tobacco – one of the few constants in his life these last few years – inside which was a small blue envelope of cigarette papers, and in a few dexterous moves conjured a neat, thin stick which he passed to Henning. He did the same for himself, then lit them both with a single match.
‘Fuck, that's better,’ said Henning, his cheeks still sucked in, refusing to exhale the first drag. He looked hard at Tom, as if seeing him for the first time. ‘It's been a long time. You doing OK?’
‘Never better.’
‘That's good.’ Henning took another long drag. ‘Because you look like shit.’
Tom let out a laugh, which triggered a broad Henning grin, the smile that had made Tom instantly like the man when they first met all those years ago. That and the Munchau patois, flawless English with an Australian lilt and the earthy vocabulary to match. Tom had seen it take shape: they had served on the Australian-led East Timor mission together. Their friendship had been one legacy of that experience. That the Legal Counsel had become that rarest of creatures – a Hessen-born doctor of jurisprudence with a mouth like a Bondi surfer – was another.
‘So you don't miss the old place? Working for the family of nations and all that?’
‘No, I don't miss it. So, Henning, we're both busy guys. What is it you need?’
‘It's about this—’ he trailed off. ‘About what happened here this morning.’
‘Yeah, what is all this? I saw the police line and—’
‘You don't know? Christ, Tom, all those fat corporate fees and you can't afford a radio? A man was shot here about two hours ago, a suspected terrorist.’
‘OK.’
‘Not OK,’ said Henning. He exhaled a plume, then checked left and right. In a whisper, his eyes intent, he said, ‘Turns out we got the wrong guy.’
‘He wasn't a terrorist?’
‘Apparently we killed some pensioner in a woolly coat.’
‘What do you mean, “we”?’
‘Don't go blabbing a word about this, Tom. I'm serious, mate. Not a fucking word. Media don't know yet.’
‘Of course.’
‘The shooter was from our own bloody security force.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Jesus is right.’ Henning took a long, final drag, sucking the life out of the tiny, hand-rolled cigarette, then threw it to the ground. ‘Just unbelievable bad luck. NYPD Intelligence tipped us off about a suspect who'd been visiting an arms dealer. Dressed in thick black coat, black hat. Which just so happens to be what the old boy was wearing when he went out for his morning stroll.’
‘Bad luck all round then.’
Henning gave Tom a glare. ‘This, Tom, will be the biggest nightmare to hit this place since oil-for-fucking-food. Can you imagine what the Americans will do with this? Can you imagine tomorrow's New York Post? “Now the UN kills geriatrics on the streets of New York”.’
‘Picked the right week to do it.’
‘Oh yeah, when we've only got every world leader from the King of Prussia downwards here. Not exactly the start Viren wanted, is it? Imagine, the new Secretary-General spending his first General Assembly on his knees apologizing.’
‘He knows?’
‘That's where I called you from. For the last hour, we've been in the Situation Center with his Chef de Cabinet, all the USGs. Secretary-General wasn't there: he was getting his dick sucked at some society breakfast. The building's in complete lockdown. USGs are the only ones allowed out.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about.’
‘Oh no.’
‘Hear me out, Tom. I know you said you'd never work for us again. I understand that.’
‘Good. So you'll understand me when I say, “Nice to see you, Henning but I've got to go”.’
‘But this is not working for the UN.’
‘Who is it for, then?’
‘It's for me. Consider it a personal favour. I think I have the right to ask for that.’
Tom examined Henning's face. It was the one argument to which he had no response, the same unarguable fact which had made him desert the pleasures of Miranda/Marina and come straight here. It was true: Tom owed him everything. ‘What do you need?’
‘Turns out the one good thing about this situation is that the dead guy was British.’
‘Why's that good?’
‘Because the Brits are the only ones who won't go ape about the Yanks murdering one of your citizens. Inside America, it'll be the pinko faggot UN who fucked up. Everywhere else, it'll be America who gets the blame. Trigger-happy cowboys, all that. Not the British government, though. Your boys will bend over and bite it.’
Tom would have liked to argue, but he couldn't. He remembered the campaign to get British citizens released from Guantánamo. The British government had barely raised a peep in protest, lest it offend the Americans.
‘So? Was it an American who pulled the trigger?’
‘No. Portuguese. Name of Tavares.’
Tom digested this. ‘So what do you need me to do?’ He envisaged the complex documentation that would have to be filed on the occasion of a homicide on the international territory of the UN. He could see the jurisdictional issues looming. Who would do the investigation? The NYPD or the UN Security Force itself? Who would be in charge? Henning's answer surprised him.
‘First, I need you to shadow the NYPD guys on the case. They'll have seen the body by now: they'll know we screwed up. I need you over their shoulder. Just for this first day: I stuck my balls out, made a big deal of it, so I can't send out some novice to do it. It would make us look like pricks. Get a sense of what they're doing, then hand it over.’
‘And then?’
‘Then I need you to close this thing down, Tom. Make it go away. This is just too much of an embarrassment. We can't have the grieving family on television holding up pictures of Grandpa, wanting to send the bloody Secretary-General or fuck knows who else to jail. You need to go to England, find the family and do whatever it takes to make it go away. Put on the English accent, do the whole thing.’
‘I don't need to put on an English accent.’
‘Even better. Play the charming Brit and offer a gushing apology, massive compensation package, whatever they want. But no grandstanding, OK? No photo-ops with the Secretary-General or any of that bullshit. He's new. We can't have him associated with this.’
Tom took a drag of his own cigarette. He could see the politics clearly enough: his departure had left no Brits in the Office of the Legal Counsel. Plus it probably helped to have an outside lawyer do this: arms' length, so that the UN itself would be less tainted by whatever shabbiness Tom would have to resort to in order to get a result.
But it was hardly a top-flight legal assignment. He would not have to liaise with Foreign Office lawyers or diplomatic officials. He would probably have to deal with some London ambulance-chaser desperate to get his hands on a pot of UN cash. Bit of a waste of his CV: eleven years as an international lawyer with the UN and before that a legal resumé that included spells doing litigation in a City firm and three years as an academic at University College, London.
‘There are plenty of Brits around who could do this, Henning. Maybe not at the most senior level, but just below. Perfectly capable lawyers. Why me, Henning?’
‘Because you're a safe pair of hands.’
Tom raised an eyebrow: a lawyer who'd left the UN the way he had was not what you'd call a safe pair of hands. Come on, the eyebrow said, tell the truth.
‘OK, you're not a conventional safe pair of hands. But you're someone I can rely on.’
Tom made a face that said flattery wasn't going to work.
Henning sighed in resignation. ‘You know what they're like, the young lawyers here, Tom. Christ, we were both like that not so long ago. Full of idealistic bullshit about the UN as “the ultimate guarantor of human rights” and all that crap.’
‘So?’
‘So we don't need any of that now. We need someone who will do what needs to be done.’
‘You need a cynic.’
‘I need a realist. Besides, you're not afraid to put the rulebook to one side every now and then. This might be one of those times.’
Tom said nothing.
‘Above all, I know that you'll regard the interests of the United Nations as paramount.’ The hint of a smile playing around the corner of Henning's mouth gave that one away. He couldn't risk some British lawyer who might – how would one put it? – lose sight of his professional allegiances. Always a risk a Brit might give a call to his old pals at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, just to keep them in the loop. Lunch in Whitehall, a bit of chit-chat, no harm done. But there was no risk of that with Tom Byrne, graduate of Sheffield Grammar and the University of Manchester. He could be relied on not to betray the UN to his old boy network for one very simple reason: he didn't have an old boy network.
‘You know me: I'm a citizen of the world.’
‘I knew I could rely on you, Tom.’
‘You did a lot for me, Henning. I haven't forgotten.’
‘After this, we're even. Really. Which is not to say you won't be properly rewarded.’
‘Not the usual crappy UN rates?’
‘Separate budget for this, Tom. Emergency fund.’
‘So I'm to give the family whatever they want.’
‘Yep. Your job is to make sure that, after today, none of us ever hears another word about the dead old guy. When he gets buried, I want this whole thing buried with him.’
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_e9a6f78a-c4e3-57b6-8216-82a3d5fd9e84)
Henning led them through the press gauntlet, the pair of them using their shoulders to carve a passage. Reporters threw questions at Henning even though they clearly had no idea who he was but he said nothing until they had reached the entrance of the makeshift tent that contained the dead man's body.
‘Tom, this is Jay Sherrill. The Commissioner tells me he is one of his elite, first grade detectives.’
‘First grade? That sounds junior.’ He couldn't help it: the guy looked about nineteen. Maybe early thirties, tops. Neatly pressed shirt; studious absence of a tie; sleek, hairless, handsome face. Tom could have drawn up a profile of Jay Sherrill then and there: one of the fast-track Ivy Leaguers favoured by all urban police forces these days. They were the young guns who spoke and dressed more like management consultants than cops. Had probably done a fortnight on the street and was thereafter catapulted to the first rank of the force. Tom had read an article about men like this in the New York Times magazine, how they never wore uniform – they were ‘out of the bag’ in NYPD jargon – and how they did their own hours. They were the new officer class.
‘Young, sure. But with a ninety-six per cent conviction rate.’ The accent was posh Boston; he sounded like a Kennedy.
‘Ninety-six per cent, eh? Which one got away?’
‘The one with the best lawyer.’
Henning stepped in. ‘All right. As you know, Commissioner Riley and I have agreed that the UN and NYPD are going to work closely on this one. And that means you two fellows. Are we clear?’
‘We're clear,’ said Sherrill, making a pitch for the high ground of maturity. ‘Mr Byrne, I'm on my way to meet the head of security for this building. You're welcome to come with me.’
Tom dutifully followed, noting Henning's schoolmasterly gaze. He would behave himself. ‘Let's hope you're the first person he's spoken to,’ he offered, in a tone he hoped suggested a truce.
‘You worried he might have talked to the press?’
‘No, I'm worried he might have talked to someone in this building. It leaks.’ Tom was thinking of his own mission to London, what he would say to the family. He didn't need a whole lot of rumours reaching them before he did.
As they walked through the visitors' marquee, now closed to the public, and into the eerily quiet foyer of the main building, Tom raised a palm in farewell to Henning, off to a meeting of the top brass. He realized what a pushover he had been. The Tom Byrne of more than a decade ago would have been appalled. But that Tom Byrne was long gone.
They rode in an empty elevator to the first floor. For Tom, being back in this building was at once instantly familiar and yet, after more than a year's absence, oddly nostalgic too – like coming back to your own city after a long trip abroad.
Harold Allen was waiting for them. Tom had never spoken to him before, but he recognized him. He'd once been the most senior African-American officer in the NYPD before he had famously sued his own force for racial discrimination. Once tipped as a future commissioner, he was now in charge of a mere corner of the city he might have led – and, thought Tom, even in this small patch he had managed to run headlong into a weapons-grade scandal. The anxiety was carved into his face. He showed his guests to a round table in the middle of the room, a few paces ahead of his own desk. Tom noticed the multiple framed NYPD citations for bravery on the wall.
Sherrill wasted no time on pleasantries. ‘As you can imagine, I've got a few questions for you, Mr Allen.’
‘Yeah, you and this whole goddamn building.’
Tom listened and took notes as Allen talked through the sequence of events: the initial tip-off from the NYPD about the Russian; the recorded phone call from the hotel room to reception; his own instruction to his watch commanders to be on the lookout for a man fitting the description the police had provided; how that message had been passed onto the guards at the gate, including one Felipe Tavares; the confusion and finally the shooting. A tragic case of mistaken identity.
‘Where is Officer Tavares now?’
‘He's with one of the NYPD support officers.’
Tom's forehead crinkled into a question mark.
‘Getting counselling.’
‘Counselling? I see.’ That would look great in the Daily News. ‘Minutes after they'd murdered a pensioner, the authorities sprang into action – pouring out tea and sympathy for the killer.’
‘Yes, Mr Byrne, counselling. I guess you've never been on the front line in law enforcement. Tavares is in a state of grave shock. He's a good man. Just came from him now.’
‘How's he bearing up?’ It was Sherrill, his voice softened.
‘Keeps moaning and repeating, “That could have been my father. That could have been my father”. He's in a bad way.’
‘Do we know how old the dead man was?’
Allen got up and walked back to his desk. He was heavy, wide; probably had been fit enough as a young man, thought Tom, eyeing the commendations on the wall. But somehow he had let it go. He returned with a single sheet of paper. ‘Seems like he was seventy-seven years old. Name of Gerald Merton. Place of birth, Kaunas, Lithuania.’
‘Lithuania? Not many Gerald Mertons there,’ said Sherrill, with a smile that conveyed he was pleased with himself. ‘Does it say when he went to England?’
‘Nope. Just the date and place of birth.’
‘What is that you're looking at, Mr Allen?’
‘This is a photocopy of his passport.’
‘His what?’ No softness now.
‘His passport. One of my men removed it from the pocket of the deceased, seconds after he was killed. Wanted to check his ID.’
‘I strongly hope you're joking.’
‘I'm afraid not, Mr Sherrill. We put it back, though.’
‘Have your men never heard about preserving a crime scene, about contamination of evidence? My God!’
‘Handling a homicide is not what we do here, Mr Sherrill. It's never happened before.’
Tom saw an opening. ‘Can I see that?’
Allen handed over the piece of paper, but with visible reluctance. That was par for the course at the UN; people were always clinging onto information, the only real currency in the building.
Tom stared at the copy of the photograph. It was grainy, but distinct enough to make out. The man was clearly old, but his face was not heavily lined, nor thin and sagging. Tom thought of his own father in his final months, how the flesh had wasted away. This man's head was still firm and round, a hard, meaty ball with a close crop of white hair on each side. None on top. The eyes were unsmiling; tough. Tom's eye moved back to the place of birth: Kaunas, Lithuania. Under nationality, it stated boldly: British Citizen.
He passed it to Sherrill who scanned it for a few seconds and then said, ‘We'll need to have copies of all the paper you've got in this case.’
‘You got it.’
‘And I think we need to speak with Officer Tavares.’
‘That may be difficult. He's not in a state right now—’
‘Mr Allen, this is not a request.’
Allen's temples were twitching. ‘I'll see what I can do.’
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_9b5398b0-e00e-59a8-8b48-b3d281a82787)
Tom understood that the NYPD had made a priority of this case: the deployment of summa cum laude Sherrill proved that. He understood why they had done it, too: the politics of New York City meant that even a terror-attack-that-wasn't, since it involved an iconic target, had to get the full-dress treatment. Still, it was hard not to be impressed by seeing it in action.
By the time Sherrill had returned to the makeshift tent the corpse had already been zipped up in a body-bag and despatched to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. The post-mortem would begin immediately: preliminary results would be in within a few hours. Sherrill gestured to one of the multiple police cars still idling outside UN Plaza, its driver clearly a personal chauffeur, urging Tom to get in and join him on the back seat. This, Tom guessed, was not how the NYPD investigated the average crackhead slaying in Brownsville. The journey was short, a quick zip south along First Avenue, which had once been Tom's daily route home. The traffic was circulating again; people were out shopping. For them, the death at the UN had been a morning inconvenience that had now passed. Just past the Bellevue Hospital, Sherrill tapped on his driver's shoulder and leapt out when the car halted. ‘Ordinarily no one's allowed to witness an autopsy,’ he explained to Tom. ‘But I find a sheet of results doesn't give the full picture. And they don't say no to first-grade detectives.’
They waited only a few minutes at reception before a middle-aged woman in surgeon's scrubs appeared. When Sherrill introduced Tom she gave him an expression he translated as, ‘OK, Mr UN Lawyer. Prepare yourself for an eyeful…’
She opened a pair of double doors by punching a code into a keypad and led them down one corridor, then another. There was no smell of rotting flesh. Instead he saw fleetingly, through one half-opened door, the familiar paraphernalia of an office: zany decorations, including a stray thread of ribbon leading up to a sagging helium balloon; he heard a radio tuned to some Lite FM station. At last she walked them into what seemed to be a hospital ward. The odour of disinfectant was high.
‘All righty, let's put these on.’ She handed them both green surgical gowns and hats, pulled back a green curtain and there it was. A slab on a gurney, under a rough sheet.
She moved a pair of spectacles from her head and settled them on her nose. ‘Here's where I got to before I was so rudely interrupted,’ she said, pulling back the sheet.
The body was on its side, a vast hulk of pale white flesh like the underside of a fish, though now tinged with green. Was that the light reflecting off the curtains? Tom couldn't tell. Strangely, his eye found the unbroken flesh first. The wound, the torn opening in the back, ringed by frayed threads of red, he only saw later, and when he saw it he could not look away. It was the depth of it that appalled him, the deep, red depth of it.
‘… consistent with severe trauma to the trunk, shattered shoulder blade, ruptured lung and exploded right ventricle…’
Tom was not listening. His eye was still gazing into the crimson gash, now congealed. It had the broken, rough edges of a hole in a plaster wall, as if a fist had punched right through it.
‘Let me turn him over for you.’
The two men had been standing opposite the pathologist, with the body between them and her. Now, they moved around so that they were alongside her. There was no smell yet, but the sight was powerful enough. Tom felt a hint of nausea.
‘You can see the exit hole here. Which means you'll have to be looking for a bullet.’
Tom focused on the dead man's face. The passport photograph must have been recent; the same full, roundness of head was still visible, hard as a billiard ball. He moved his hand forward, contemplating a touch.
‘Don't!’
He looked up at the pathologist, who was holding two latexed hands up in the air. ‘You don't have gloves.’
Tom gestured his retreat and took the opportunity to ask a question. ‘Can I see his eyes?’
She stepped closer and, with no hesitation, pulled back one eyelid, then another, as roughly as if she were checking on a roasting chicken.
For that brief second, the inert lump of dead flesh, a butcher's product, was transformed back into a man. The eyes seemed to look directly at Tom's own. If they were saying something, Tom had missed it. The moment was too short.
‘I'm sorry, can I see his eyes again?’
‘Pretty striking, huh?’
Tom hadn't noticed it the first time but now, as she pulled back both lids, pinning them with her latex thumbs and holding the position, he saw immediately what she meant. They were a bright, piercing blue.
‘He was strong, wasn't he?’ Tom pointed at the thickness of the dead man's upper arms. When his father had hit his seventies his arms had thinned, the skin eventually flapping loosely. But this corpse still had biceps.
‘You bet. Look at this.’ She pulled back the rest of the sheet revealing a flaccid penis, its foreskin drooping limply, before prodding the man's thick thighs: the butcher's shop again. ‘That's some serious muscle.’
‘And that's unusual for a man this age?’
‘Highly. Must have been some kind of fitness freak.’
‘What about that?’ It was Sherrill, anxious not to be forgotten – and to remind Tom who was in charge here. He was gesturing at a patch of metal bandaged to the dead man's left leg like a footballer's shin pad.
‘That appears to be some kind of support. It's unusual. When plates are used in reconstructive surgery, they're inserted under the skin. This is obviously temporary. Maybe it was used as a splint after a muscle strain. Odd to use metal though. It will probably become clearer once we see the deceased's medical records.’
‘What about that?’ Sherrill asked pointing at the lifeless left foot. There was a big toe, another one next to it and then a space where the other three should have been.
‘I hadn't got to that yet,’ the doctor said, with a welcome implication that he was ahead of her – and Sherrill. She moved to the end of the gurney, so that she could examine the foot from above. ‘These are old wounds,’ she said. ‘Maybe an industrial accident as a much younger man.’
‘Can you tell how old they are?’
‘Put it this way, I don't imagine this playing much of a role in your investigation. I would estimate these wounds are no less than sixty years old.’
CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_535c2c7f-8a29-5e62-88f6-3c5099547d9a)
Sherrill resumed with a battery of technical questions, most of which seemed to centre on ballistics. He and the pathologist were now trading in a technical dialect Tom didn't speak, all calibres and contusions, and that was when he noticed, lying casually on the top of a small cabinet of drawers, several clear, ziplocked plastic bags, the kind airport security hand out for valuables. One of these contained a plain white plastic card that looked like a hotel room key, another a clunky, outdated mobile phone. These had to be the possessions of the deceased, removed from his pockets prior to the post-mortem and carefully bagged up. Tom remembered Sherrill's scolding of the security chief over the passport.
As casually as he could, Tom picked up the first plastic bag. Sure enough, the card inside bore the imprint of the Tudor Hotel, suggesting once again that this poor old buffer was no suicide bomber: he probably planned to go back to his room after his ‘mission’ to UN Plaza, no doubt to have a nice cup of tea and a lie-down. There was Merton's passport, a few dollar bills, a crumpled tourist information leaflet, probably taken from the hotel lobby: Getting to Know… UN Plaza.
Sherrill's stream of technicalia was still flowing when a head popped round the door, summoning the pathologist outside. Tom seized the moment to beckon the detective over and show him the bag containing the phone. Through the plastic he reached for the power button, then brought up the last set of numbers dialled, recognizing the familiar 011-44 of a British number and then, below that, a New York cellphone, beginning 1-917. Instantly Sherrill pulled out a notebook and scribbled down both numbers. Tom did the same. He was about to bring up the Received Calls list, and then take a look at the messages, when a ‘Battery Empty’ sign flashed up and the screen went blank.
Sherrill waited for the pathologist to return, peppered her with a few more questions before making arrangements for a full set of results to be couriered over to him later that afternoon. Then he and Tom went back to the UN, to the security department on the first floor where, on a couch and armed with a cup of sweet tea, sat a pale and trembling Felipe Tavares.
Despite himself, Tom had to admit, Sherrill was a class act. He spoke to the Portuguese officer quietly and patiently, asking him to run through the events of that morning, nodding throughout, punctuating the conversation with ‘of course’ and ‘naturally’, as if they were simply chatting, cop to cop. Unsaid, but hinted at, was the assumption that if Sherrill had his way no police officer was going to be in trouble simply for doing his job. All Felipe – can I call you Felipe? – had to do was tell Jay everything that happened.
The part of the narrative that interested Sherrill most seemed to be the moment Tavares had received the alert from the Watch Commander supplying the description of the potential terror suspect: black coat, woollen hat and the rest. Sherrill pressed the officer for an exact time; Tavares protested that he had not checked his watch. What about the precise wording? Felipe said it was difficult to remember; the rain had been coming down so hard he had struggled to hear properly. Other officers must have heard it too: it was a ‘broadcast’ message to all those on duty. ‘That's right,’ said Sherrill. ‘I'll be checking with them, too.’
The detective did his best to sound casual asking what was clearly, at least to Tom's legal ears, the key question. It came once Felipe described the moment he pulled the trigger.
‘At that instant, did you reasonably believe your life was in danger?’
‘Yes. I thought he was suicide bomber. Not just my life in danger. Everyone's life.’
‘And you thought that because you saw some kind of bomb?’
‘No! I told you already. I thought it because of the message we had, the warning about a man who look like this. And because of the faces of those men I saw. The way they looked so shocked, and the black man screaming “No!” like he was desperate.’
‘And you now think they were screaming because they could see the man was, in fact, very old. Not a terrorist at all. They were shouting “No!” not to him, but to you, urging you not to shoot.’
Felipe Tavares' head sank onto his chest. Quietly he replied, ‘Yes.’
‘Yet that black man, and the man with him, when you looked later, you say there was no sign of them?’
‘No sign.’
‘Isn't that a little strange? Two men watching what happens close enough to see the old man's face, involved enough to urge you not to shoot, just vanishing into thin air?’
‘It is strange, sir. But that what happen.’
Tom watched carefully. He noticed that Sherrill was writing nothing down. The detective continued.
‘And, just to conclude, Felipe, you have no idea why the Watch Commander gave his warning then? At that particular time?’
‘No. I just heard the message and then I saw the man they describe.’ Tavares looked down at his feet again. ‘Well, I thought I saw the man.’
Tom could see the cogs in Sherrill's mind turning, as if he was getting what he needed. Quite what that was, Tom had not yet worked out.
By now he had done what Henning had requested: he had overseen day one of the investigation. It was time to say his goodbyes if he was to make the overnight flight to London. Tom briefed the lawyer Munchau had chosen to take his place at Sherrill's side – a Greek woman specializing in human rights – and then introduced her to Sherrill. To Tom's surprise, the detective did not shake him off, but promised to keep him up to date, to let him know whatever the forensics guys and the medical examiner turned up. He took Tom's cellphone number then insisted Tom take his – at which point the nature of Sherrill's collegiate generosity made itself apparent. With no men of his own in London, he wanted Tom to pass on whatever he discovered about the victim.
In a cab on the way back to his apartment – it would take just a couple of minutes to pack a bag before dashing off for the airport – Tom made the last call he needed, as arranged, to get briefed by Harold Allen on the details he would need in London.
‘How are things, Harold?’
‘Not great, Tom, I'll be straight with you.’ He sounded rough, like a man whose career is flashing before his eyes.
‘Have the family now been notified?’
‘USG made the call nearly an hour ago.’
‘Widow?’
‘No widow. Just one daughter apparently. I'll email the co-ordinates.’
‘Press?’
‘They haven't got the name yet. Just confirmation of a Caucasian male.’
‘Has his age been announced?’
Allen sighed. ‘Not yet.’
Tom felt sorry for the guy. Depending on how nuclear the media went on this, Allen was shaping up to be the obvious fall-guy. Just senior enough to be culpable, but not so senior his sacrifice would actually cost the high command. Tom knew the battle cry always raised when trouble hit the UN: ‘Deputy heads must roll!’
He offered some bland words of reassurance and hung up. As he looked out of the window at the late-afternoon mothers pushing buggies, picking up their kids from day-care, he wondered who he should phone. No need to speak to the Fantonis: BlackBerry and cellphone contact would be fine for them, no matter where he was. He thought of the guys from his five-a-side team, all Brits, most of them former City boys trousering a squillion a week on Wall Street. He should tell them he'd be missing the Wednesday game. Otherwise, he had no one else to call.
The afternoon traffic on the Van Wyck Expressway was heavy. Tom pushed back into the worn, fake-leather seat of the cab and closed his eyes. He reached into his pocket to check his passport when he felt the hard cover of his notebook. He probably ought to call Sherrill, tell him that the family had just been informed, which meant the press would soon get the dead man's name.
He flicked through the pages looking for the detective's number but instead came across the scribbled note he had made at the medical examiner's office.
Now, in his other hand, he fired up his BlackBerry. A message from Allen's office, as promised. A name, a London address and two phone numbers, the second clearly recognizable as a mobile. Rebecca Merton, it said. Tom glanced at the long UK number he had seen on the phone in the Ziploc bag. Sure enough, they matched. Gerald Merton's last telephone call had been to his daughter.
Without thinking, Tom tapped out the digits of the second number he had found on the dead man's cellphone, beginning 1-917. The number sat there, lighting up the display for several seconds. He knew that he ought to leave this to Sherrill; that the NYPD would, as a matter of routine, check out the numbers on the victim's phone. There was no reason for Tom to do it himself. Tom looked out of the window, weighed it up – and then pushed the little green button to activate the call.
It would probably just be the number for a taxi service the old guy had used to collect him from the airport. Or perhaps some relative he had been planning to visit.
Tom put the phone to his ear, hearing it connect and then the long tone of a first ring. A silence and then one more ring. And then a male voice.
At first Tom assumed it was a wrong number. Either the old man had dialled it incorrectly or Tom had scrawled the digits down too fast, both eminently possible. He was about to apologize for his mistake when instinct silenced him. He heard the voice again, first speaking to someone else, as if winding up another conversation, then calling out hello, hello – and a shudder passed through him, making even his scalp turn cold.
It wasn't the accent, though that was what had first alerted him, nor even that tell-tale half sentence Tom had heard, spoken in a language Tom had studied back in his university days. No, it was the tone, the brusque hardness. Tom disconnected before saying a word and held the phone tight in his hand. With relief, he remembered that these new BlackBerries came with an automatic block on Caller ID. That man would not be calling back.
A quick call to Allen – and from him to a friend in the NYPD Intelligence Division who took pity on a former comrade clearly in the wringer – confirmed Tom's hunch. He had Allen read out the number his NYPD source had passed on twice over. When Allen asked why Tom needed it, he deployed an old party trick, speaking a few apparently broken words, and then hung up. It would sound to Allen as if Tom had disappeared into a tunnel and lost signal.
The choked roads gave Tom Byrne some time as the car crawled the final few miles to John F Kennedy Airport. He knew he should relay his discovery to Jay Sherrill immediately, but he hesitated. He wanted to think this through. Besides, Sherrill would get there soon enough; just a matter of dialling the number they had both written down.
If he did that he would hear what Tom had heard. He would be able to confirm that the man whose number had been in the late Gerald Merton's telephone was the arms supplier the New York Police Department had branded long ago as ‘the Russian’.
CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_c723613c-292a-53b1-8321-70e5c5aa0cf3)
They never did say welcome home. Tom always imagined they did, or that at least one day they would, but they never did. The immigration officer on the dawn shift at Heathrow had simply glanced down at the passport picture, glanced back up, and then nodded him through.
You couldn't blame him. For all he knew, Tom might have been back after a two-day trip. No big deal. He wasn't to know that this was always an unsettling moment for an Englishman who had made his home in New York since his late twenties. Whenever he came back Tom felt the same curious mix: the familiarity of a native and the bemusement of a stranger.
The country had changed so much. When he had left London the city had been in the doldrums of a recession, the place still creaking from a postwar period it had never really left behind. But now London seemed to crackle with energy. Every time he came back, Tom noticed the skyline was filled with new buildings or cranes putting up new buildings. You only had to look at the shop-fronts, the hoardings, the street cafés to smell the money. The contrast with New York used to be sharp: in Manhattan the skyscrapers were taller, the restaurants better, the shops open for longer. Now the two places looked more alike than ever.
But the biggest change was the people. There were Russian billionaires in Park Lane, Latvian cleaners in Islington and Poles everywhere. He had seen a black British comedian on cable TV lament that these days if you saw a white person in London, you could no longer assume they spoke English.
He took the Heathrow Express into town with one thought still preoccupying him: why was the Russian's number on Gerald Merton's mobile phone?
First, Tom had wondered if the old man had been the victim of a very skilful and cunning case of identity theft. Perhaps terrorists had spotted him, then deliberately dressed like him in order to confuse their pursuers. Maybe, at some point, they had even used – and then returned to him – his mobile phone, knowing that anyone listening in, or tailing them, would be led to the dead end of an aged British tourist.
But it all seemed a stretch. The simplest explanation was that Gerald Merton had indeed phoned the Russian arms dealer himself and gone to see him on Monday, just as the Feds said he had. There were not two men in black, just one.
The very thought made Tom smile. It meant that his old friend Henning Munchau might not be in such deep trouble after all. If Tom could prove that the UN had not shot an entirely innocent man they could put aside the sackcloth and ashes. Henning would be off the hook; Tom would have done all that had been asked of him and more. His debt to Henning would be discharged and there might even be a cash bonus in it for him.
Sure, it was unusual: a suspected terrorist aged seventy-seven. But, hey, these guys were crazy. Children had been used as suicide bombers, women, too, even pregnant ones. Why couldn't Gerald Merton have been the first pensioner accelerating his entry to paradise? He might not have been wearing an explosive belt when he was shot, but Tom could argue that Merton's stroll to the UN had been a reconnaissance mission, timing the walk from the Tudor Hotel to UN Plaza to see what obstacles he encountered, work out how far he could get before he was stopped. He was probably planning to return the very next day, strapped into a bomb supplied by the Russian.
Motive would be the big problem. Most likely Merton had been promised a cash payment for the family he would leave behind. After all, what cause could this old man have believed in so passionately that he was ready to wreak havoc in the headquarters of the United Nations?
Tom reached for his notebook, looking again at the bare details he had gleaned from Allen. A date of birth as far into the past as Tom's dead father's. Place of birth: Kaunas, Lithuania.
Maybe that was the key fact. He'd read magazine stories about the rise and rise of the Eastern European mafia for years now. This ‘Gerald Merton’ could have been one of them, recently arrived in the UK and either an elderly godfather himself or, more likely, a jobbing assassin paid to whack somebody at the UN.
Still, the UN would need more evidence than a single number on a mobile phone to justify the gunning down of an elderly man. And the place to get it was London.
The TV screen on the train announced that Paddington was approaching. He remembered from his last visit the giant screens at railway stations, usually carrying a twenty-four-hour news channel. There were screens on the sides of buses now, even at bus stops. Cameras on every corner too, many more in London than you'd ever get away with in New York. George Orwell got more right than he realized.
At Paddington he took a cab. There was no time to check in to the hotel or catch some sleep, however tempting. He needed to see Merton's daughter as soon as possible, before the entire membership of the Amalgamated Union of Lefty Lawyers and America Bashers had descended on her doorstep, offering to put her father's face onto posters in every student bedroom in the land. He could imagine their excitement at the prospect. The protests against the Met's shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes had been lively enough, but in that case the target had only been the humble Metropolitan Police. So long as they could make New York, and therefore America, the bad guy, the death of Gerald Merton offered much richer pickings. Tom knew these people, he knew how their minds worked. He knew only too well.
He was just a short distance away now from Merton's daughter's address, watching as people closed their front doors and headed for work. Most of the buildings were old Georgian houses divided into flats. He had imagined her living in a tidy suburban semi, with a husband and at least a couple of kids. But this was not that kind of neighbourhood. He was in Clerkenwell, the residential pocket just east of the sleaze and grime of King's Cross.
As the cab turned into her street he saw immediately which house was hers. People were emerging from a front door with baleful expressions: making an early morning condolence call. He paid the driver, jumped out and headed in their direction. As he came closer, they looked up at him with the nodding half-smile of acknowledgement that strangers reserve for each other on these occasions. He didn't need to press the buzzer: the door was open.
He hadn't quite planned for the presence of other people. From the hallway he could hear voices on the stairs, saying goodbye. He headed up.
For a second, he was confused. In front of him were two women in an embrace, one of them sobbing loudly, the other, taller woman, offering comfort. Yet he felt certain that this calm, tearless woman was the daughter of Gerald Merton. It was her eyes that confirmed it. They were as striking as the ones that had stared back at him on the mortuary slab in New York less than twenty-four hours earlier.
‘Hello,’ he said, extending a hand. ‘I'm so sorry to come unannounced like this. My name is Tom Byrne and I'm from the United Nations.’
She fixed the extraordinary eyes upon him, then said in a clear and penetrating voice. ‘I think you'd better leave.’
CHAPTER TEN (#ulink_6ed399ac-f0c7-5b86-bdfe-557b6e2ce776)
Taken aback, it took Tom several seconds to realize that she was not speaking to him, but to her departing guests.
‘You call us if you need anything, Rebecca,’ said the husband, who Tom guessed was roughly her age, in his early thirties. The wife tried to say something too, but the eyes welled again and she shook her head in defeat.
Throughout Tom kept his gaze on Rebecca, who was standing tall and straight-backed in this wobbling, sobbing huddle. Everything about her was striking, nothing was moderate. Her hair was a deep, dark black; her nose was not short or button-neat, like the Vogue and Elle girls he dated in New York. Instead it was strong and, somehow, proud. Most arresting were those eyes of clearest green: not the same colour as her father's, but with the same shining brilliance. They seemed to burn not with the grief he had been expecting but with something altogether more controlled. He found that he could not look away from her.
‘You can come in here,’ she said.
He followed her into a room whose clutter he rapidly tried to interpret. The polished wood floors, the battered, and tiny, TV in the corner were predictable enough: urban bohemian. The books surprised him. Not the first couple of shelves of fiction, contemporary novels alongside Flaubert, Eliot and Hardy, but the rest: they seemed to be journals of some kind. He took a glance at the rest of the flat. No sign yet of another person. No sign of a man.
She sat down in a plain wooden chair, gesturing for him to take the more comfortable couch opposite.
He was about to speak when a phone rang: hers, a mobile. She looked at the display and answered it without hesitation.
‘Not at all: I said you could call. What's happening?’ She began nodding as she received what appeared to be a staccato burst of information. ‘She's hypotensive now, you say? Despite good gram-negative coverage? Poor girl, this is the last thing she needs. Remember, she's been treated for AML. I'd make sure she's on Vancomycin and call intensive care to let them know she may need pressors. And, Dr Haining? Keep me posted.’
Tom looked back at the shelves, packed with what he could now see was an apparently full set of the Journal of Paediatric Oncology. He waited for her to close the clamshell phone and began, his opening line now duly revised. ‘Dr Merton. You know why I'm here. I've flown into New York this morning because of a grave mistake.’
‘London. You're in London.’ She showed him a brief glimpse of a smile. It was crooked, the teeth sharp between full lips. He worried that he was staring. He could feel his pulse quicken.
‘Sorry. London. Yes.’ He tried to collect himself, to handle this like any other meeting. Remember your objectives: placate this woman without anything resembling an admission of liability. ‘The Secretary-General of the United Nations asked me to come here as soon as this tragedy occurred to convey his personal sorrow and regret at what happened to your father. He speaks for the entire—’
‘You can save the speech.’ She was staring right at him, her eyes dry. ‘I don't need a speech.’
He had planned on her breaking down, needing comfort and solace. Or else hurling abuse at him in a righteous fury. This was not in the plan. ‘There's no speech.’ Tom lifted his hands away from his briefcase.
‘Good, because I don't want a string of platitudes. I want answers.’
‘OK’
‘Let's start with this. How on earth could any police force in the world not recognize a seventy-seven year old man when it saw one?’
‘Well, identification is one of the key issues that—’
‘And what the hell happened to shooting in the legs? Even I know that when police want to immobilize a suspect they shoot in the legs.’
‘Standard procedure in the case of a suspected suicide bomber is to shoot at the head—’
‘Suicide bomber? Fuck you!’
He paused, shocked by the obscenity, the silence filling the air. ‘Listen–’
‘Fuck you.’ Quieter this time.
‘I understand that you—’
‘Have you ever come across a seventy-seven year old suicide bomber, Mr Byrne?’
‘Look. Perhaps it would help if I walked you through the events of Monday morning, as best we know them.’ He didn't even sound like himself, resorting to the plodding legalspeak he hated. He was finding it hard to concentrate; every time he so much as looked at this woman, he felt he was being shoved off his stride.
‘OK. So my Dad's on a little retirement vacation and decides to be a tourist and visit the UN. Then what happened?’
Tom reached into his bag for the sheaf of papers he had brought, the timelines and FBI reports he and Sherrill had got from Allen so that he would be able to maintain at least the pretence of full disclosure. He had seen enough of these cases over the years to know that it was that above all – the lack of openness, the sense that the authorities were concealing the truth – that always enraged the grieving families. He had planned to give Rebecca Merton every detail, show her the precise sequence of events, each split-second decision, until she would, despite her loss, have to concede that it was a tragic but innocent mistake and that the UN security team had been in an impossible position: how could they risk a suicide bomber killing tens, scores of innocents? They had taken one life in the sincere belief that they were saving many more. That was what he needed her to accept.
‘Don't start giving me some presentation, Mr Byrne. I don't want you trying to bury me in papers, blinding me with science. I'm a doctor, I know that trick.’
‘All right.’ Tom put the papers back and leant forward in his chair. ‘Tell me how we can help.’
‘I want an apology.’
‘Of course the United Nations feel the deepest—’
‘Not from you. From the boss. I want a face-to-face meeting with the Secretary-General. I want him to look me in the eye and admit what the United Nations has done. This was not some minor slip-up; this was killing my father. For no reason. And that means a full apology, in person, from the man at the top.’
Tom remembered Henning's sole condition: no grandstanding, no photo-ops. ‘Look, a tragedy happened yesterday. We know that. And the United Nations wants to show that it recognizes the scale of that tragedy. We'd like to make a gesture, to establish a fund available to you for whatever purpose seems appropriate. It could be a memorial—’
‘Sorry, I think I misheard you. What did you say?’ There was a second flash of that crooked smile.
‘I said that the UN is willing to acknowledge the life of Gerald Merton with a one-off payment.’ He immediately regretted one-off.
‘Christ.’ She shook her head, the full lips slowly colouring a deep red, as if her rage was filling them with blood. ‘Maybe the headbangers are right after all. So the UN's not just anti-Israel, it's anti-Semitic as well.’
Tom frowned. ‘I'm sorry?’
‘You'd better be more than sorry, Mr Byrne. Is this really what you think of us? That you can buy us off with blood money?’
‘I don't underst—’
‘You think this is what Jews are like? That we'd let you kill our parents so long as the price is right?’
‘I had no idea—’
‘That's right. You have no idea at all.’
Her mobile rang again. He was trying to digest what she had just said, but as she stood up, all he could focus on was her shape. She was slim, but not skinny. He could see that even in thrown-on jeans and a loose black top, she had the figure not of the anorexic dolls you saw in Manhattan but of a real woman.
‘Hi Nick. How's she doing? How's her chest X-ray look? That's not good.’ She began nodding, murmuring her assent to the voice on the phone. ‘Sounds like she's developing ARDS. That's what I'd worry about with strep, viridans sepsis. All right, tell the parents I'll call them soon. They've been through the wringer: they need to hear a familiar voice. Thanks, Nick.’
He was trying not to stare, but it was an unequal struggle. The intensity of this woman seemed to be burning up all the oxygen in the room. There was a strange butterfly sensation in his chest, as if his heart was trembling. He told himself it was coffee or lack of sleep or jet lag. But still he couldn't look away.
So Gerald Merton was Jewish. Tom had never even considered it. Everything had thrown him off course, the name, the passport – Place of birth: Kaunas, Lithuania – and especially the corpse. Tom Byrne knew what a circumcised penis looked like and Merton's was not it.
She finished the call and turned to him. ‘I have to go: there's an emergency at the hospital.’
‘I'm sorry to hear that.’
‘Yeah, sure you are. Anyway, I don't think we have anything more to talk about, do you?’ She turned around and disappeared into the kitchen, where he could hear the jangle of car keys being scooped up.
He turned to the pile of unused documents next to him on the couch and began pushing them back into his case when he saw it: a small, black notebook on a side table. For a moment he thought it must be his own Moleskine. But as he looked closer he could see it was thicker. It was hers. On impulse, he shoved it into his bag. He would say he'd taken it by mistake: that way he'd have an excuse to come back.
He stood up and followed Rebecca Merton down the stairs and out of her front door.
‘Here's my card,’ he said, successfully repressing his surprise that she took it. ‘If you think of anything more you'd like to discuss, call me.’
She studied it for a moment, then looked back up, those emerald-clear eyes boring into him. ‘So you're not even a UN lawyer. You're the hired help. The guy they brought in to do their dirty work. Goodbye, Mr Byrne. I don't think we'll be seeing each other again.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#ulink_cae8e7e5-2f4b-58c5-ad4b-3c4ecc25d87e)
Tom watched her stalk across the road, get into her old-model Saab and drive off, then stood as if paralysed for a minute or more, trying to work out the effect she had had on him. It wasn't the usual feeling, the sensation he would often get at a Manhattan party or during drinks at the Royalton: spotting some young beauty and lazily deciding he wanted her, the way you might pick a delicacy off a menu. That was how he had kept his bed filled in New York, but this was different.
He felt as if he had just run ten kilometres around Central Park. There was a flush in his cheeks; his pulse was elevated. He remembered, abruptly, how he had felt at the age of sixteen when he had first met Kate, four years his senior, a student at the university and the convenor of the Sheffield youth branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Even saying the name – Kate – brought back the glow. She had inducted him into the ways of the world and although he had been with many women since he had never felt that same, palpitating excitement again. But he had to admit to himself, with a tinge of shame, that he was feeling something like it now. For God's sake, he told himself firmly, grow up.
A sudden deep need for coffee prompted him to walk to the top of the street where there was a small parade of shops. Mercifully one was a café. He went in, sat down at the smallest table so that no one would join him and ordered an espresso.
When it arrived he downed it in two gulps, then sat back, closed his eyes and breathed deep. Only then did he remember the book in his bag. Could it be Rebecca Merton's diary? He knew he shouldn't open it, but he couldn't help himself.
The notebook was filled, page after page, with tiny, neat blue handwriting. Instantly he knew these were not the writings of a thirty-something woman. It had been a mistake to pocket it. But he only had to read the first few sentences to realize that he – and not only he – had made a much, much graver mistake.
CHAPTER TWELVE (#ulink_60a6a58f-8d99-502d-835a-ff30d8032fad)
My name is Gershon Matzkin and I was born in Kruk, Lithuania. My British passport says I was born in Kaunas because Kruk is such a small town and no one has heard of it. And also because the name of that place should be cursed a thousand times and it is better that it is never written down.
I was the second of four children of Meir and Rebecca Matzkin. I was different from the others. My sisters had dark hair, their features proud, while I was blond and had blue eyes and a small nose. I did not look like a Jew at all.
My father would joke that maybe my mother had been too friendly with the goatherd in the village. He could joke about such things because he knew they were impossible. These days, they would say that my genes were different, mutant. But then, who knew of such things?
I was born too early. My body was tiny; they said my life was hanging by a thread. When I was eight days old the rabbi said I was too weak to have my brit milah, too weak to be circumcised. Afterwards, because of everything that happened to our family, it was delayed. Maybe my mother did not want to think about it. And after that it was too late.
The little village whose name I do not want to mention did not have many Jews, maybe a few dozen families. We kept ourselves quiet, trying to get by. But every now and then there was trouble …
I was frightened even before it started. At that age – I was perhaps seven years old – the sound of the rain on the windows was enough to scare me. I liked snow, which we had plenty of, but the rattle of raindrops against the glass frightened me: it sounded like fingers, tapping, demanding to be let in. There was no rain that night but it was very dark and that scared me too.
But this night I was not the only one afraid. My sisters too were awake and crying. Local Lithuanians were running through the streets where the few Jews lived, banging on doors, shouting: You killed Christ! Come out, you Christ-killers!
This happened every now and then, especially at Easter. Even then, when I was just a child, I could recognize the slur in their voices. They were drunk, on vodka, no doubt, but also on hatred – the hatred of the Jew fermented by their faith and distilled for nearly two thousand years. I know this now: then I was just scared.
There were more voices than usual. We waited for them to fade as they went past, but they did not. They remained loud and near. My mother sat on the bed with us – all four of us children shared a single bed back then – telling us to hush. She was holding the youngest of my sisters, little Rivvy, cradled in her arms and was singing an old Yiddish melody:
Dos tzigele is geforen handlen Dos vet zein dein beruf Rozinkes mit mandlen Shlof-zhe, Yidele, shlof.
It means:
The little goat went out looking Just as you'll do some day Bringing raisins and almonds Sleep sweet baby sleep.
The men outside were still bellowing, Zhid! Zhid! Jew! Jew! But she carried on singing that song. Shlof-zhe, Yidele, shlof. Sometimes, even now, when I remember everything that happened afterwards, I hear that song again.
At that moment none of us knew what was going on outside. My mother thought my father was downstairs, peering through a gap in the curtains, watching for the moment when the thugs grew bored and moved on. She was partly right: that was why he had gone downstairs, so that he could look and tell us when the coast was clear. But then something had caught his eye. He had seen smoke coming from the barn.
We were not farmers, but like most people in our village we kept a few animals, some chickens and a cow. And now, late at night, my father could see smoke. Surely the men from the village had thrown a torch into the barn. He thought only that he had to rescue the animals. So he ran into the barn.
I don't know when my mother first realized what had happened but she suddenly called out. ‘Meir?’ Then she saw the first orange flames. ‘Meir!’ When there was no reply she threw Rivvy aside as if she were a rag doll and ran down the stairs. We watched from the window as she fled out of the house towards the barn. I was so frightened that I stopped crying.
We saw her tugging at something, bent double, as if she were dragging a sack of seed from the barn. In the dark it was almost impossible to see that she was, in fact, pulling at the ankles of a man. Hannah made out the shape first. ‘It's Daddy,’ she said.
We never knew for certain what had happened. Perhaps the smoke was too much. Perhaps he had hit his head on a wooden beam. Maybe one of the thugs conducting the pogrom had followed him into the barn and beaten him. Whatever had happened, our mother had been too late.
She was never the same person after that. Her hair went grey and she let it fall loose; her clothes were sometimes dirty. She would wear the same skirt and blouse for days on end. She no longer laughed and if she smiled it was a strange, misshapen smile, crooked with regret and sadness. And she never again sang the lullaby.
She decided we could no longer live in that place, whose name she would never say out loud. She had a cousin who had once lived in Kovno and so we moved there. She felt we needed to be in a big city, a place where we would not stand out. A place where there were not just a few Jews, but thousands of us. I suppose she thought there would be safety in numbers. So we headed to Kovno. If you look on a map now you will see no such place. Today they call it by its Lithuanian name: Kaunas.
We arrived when I was eight years old and I have happy memories of our first two years there. My sisters and I went to school and I discovered that I was good at learning languages. The teacher said I had an ear for it. Russian and, especially, German. I found it easy. I only had to hear a word once to remember it. Of course ‘bread’ was Brot. What else would it be? The pieces clicked together like a jigsaw puzzle. I learned and learned.
In Kruk, we had followed only the essentials of Jewish tradition and – as my own penis testified – not even all of those. We lit candles on Friday evening to mark the start of the Sabbath, but we did not do much more. In Kovno it was different. Nearly a quarter of the people of this city were Jews and in the area where we lived, everyone. There were synagogues on every street, Yiddish schools, Hebrew schools, a famous religious academy, the yeshiva at Viriampole, even a Jewish hospital. There were people to teach me how to say Kaddish for my father. We did not feel like outsiders here, even if I now looked like one.
I wish I could say my mother was happy, but she was not. We lived in a couple of rented rooms on Jurbarko Street. I do not know how she paid for them. The rooms were dark, even when the sun was shining outside. During this time, I remember my mother's eyes were always empty.
And then, one day in 1940, a different flag was flying.
It was hot that day, the sun so warm it felt as if it would dry out the damp of what had been a long winter. We were playing in the street, as usual, me trailing behind Hannah while my sisters played a game of hopscotch. I was the first to notice it. I pointed upward at the deep red flag, billowing in the breeze. I couldn't quite work out the gold shapes in the top corner; I wondered if it was a letter in some foreign alphabet. Later I learned that these were the tools of the industrial worker and the farmer, the hammer and sickle.
The Russians had arrived to make Lithuania part of the Soviet Union.
At school, the teachers seemed nervous. My Russian teacher vanished. Hannah explained to me that the Russians were arresting people. They were shutting down some of the Jewish buildings because they were against ‘the revolution’, whatever that was. Hannah heard that some of the men were taken away to Siberia. She said it was the coldest place on earth. I imagined the men standing on a huge sheet of white ice, shivering like penguins.
We were frightened of the Russians but it was not they who frightened us most. Because we soon heard that there was a resistance to the Communists, local Lithuanians who were determined to kick the Soviets out of their country. It was these people who scared us. We remembered from Kruk how these men could behave once they were angry and stirred up.
One day I saw the girls whispering. At first they would not let me see what they were all looking at. ‘No, he'll tell Mama,’ Rivvy said.
‘Tell Mama what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What have you got there?’
Eventually, they gave in. Hannah made me swear to secrecy and then she showed me. It was a leaflet she had found on the street. It said the Jews were to blame for the Communists occupying Lithuania. Without the Jews, we would be a free people!
In whispers, Hannah issued our orders. ‘We must not let Mama see this.’ I was not yet eleven years old and I knew nothing of Communism or occupation but I understood that my mother was frail, like a cup that had broken once before and must not be dropped. We succeeded too. She never did see that leaflet.
A year later I thought our troubles were over. At school, the headmaster announced that the Russians had gone. They had simply run away. Good, I thought: now the Lithuanians won't be angry with us, the Jews, for bringing the Soviets into their country. But the headmaster seemed more worried than ever.
This was June 1941. It was only after the headmaster stopped speaking, when I heard the boys in my class talking, that I understood that the Russians had not just left because they wanted to leave us in peace. They had vanished because they were frightened: the Germans had begun an invasion of the Soviet Union.
The next day I was in the street, playing catch with two other boys from school. Suddenly there was a noise, distant at first: the sound of faraway whistles and faint drums. We thought that people were celebrating, a marching band parading through the streets because the Russians had gone. But then there were new sounds: women screaming and children crying. My friend took his ball and ran. I stood there on my own for four or five seconds before a man grabbed my wrist and told me to get out of the street. ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Go home now!’ I must have looked dumb and uncomprehending because he stared at me hard. ‘Pogrom,’ he said. ‘Pogrom.’
I ran as fast as I could back to Jurbarko Street. The screams were getting louder: the Lithuanians were marking the great occasion of the Russian withdrawal the best way they knew how, by attacking any Jew they could find. On Kriščiukaičio Street, I saw a man pulled out of a shop by his ears; three men began to beat him, hitting him on the head over and over. I saw other Jews dragged off. I don't know where these Jews were taken or what happened to them afterwards. But I can guess.
The Lithuanians were wearing strange uniforms, ones I had never seen before. They were black, with the flag of Lithuania on their sleeves, like an armband. These jackets were not all identical, like the uniform of real soldiers. And the men did not march in columns, but rampaged through the streets, shouting slogans: ‘The Jews and Communists have brought shame to Lithuania!’ They called themselves the Lithuanian Activist Front.
Later we found out that they took dozens of Jews to the Lietūkis garage, in the centre of Kovno. They killed hundreds of men there. Afterwards, in a book, I learned that on that night of June 23 1941 and on the three nights that followed, they killed more than three thousand eight hundred Jews. They used axes and knives, as well as bullets; they burned people out of their houses and out of any hiding place. They drowned others in the Neris river. They torched synagogues. At the time we knew no numbers. We knew only what we could see.
I was running as fast as I could, darting in and out of entrances and into alleyways, to avoid the men in black. I thought that if they found me they might beat me up too. After all, I was eleven years old now and I was tall: they might have thought of me as more of a man than a child. And I assumed they would know that I was a Jew.
Just outside the tenement where we lived, I ran into my sisters. Hannah was so relieved to see me that she clutched me in a tight, long hug. She bundled us into the building and up the stairs so that we could warn our mother what was going on. We wanted to tell her what we had just witnessed, the terrible things that were happening. But she already knew.
I understood what had happened when I heard Hannah's cry. So small, as if she was just a little girl, which of course, now that I am a grown man, I know that she was. She tried to stop us, my other sisters and me, from seeing it, but it was too late. I saw it and I can never forget what I saw.
My mother's feet were in the air, her body dangling from a beam in the ceiling. She was hanging there, swinging like the pendulum in a clock – a clock that said we had reached the end of time.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#ulink_4e3a0485-070b-53d7-8ecb-aa5af35b6bbf)
Tom closed the notebook and looked up. This was a nightmare. Truly, a waking nightmare.
He checked his watch. Too early to call Henning. He imagined what he would tell him. ‘I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that the dead guy may not be so innocent after all. The bad news is, you killed a Holocaust survivor.’
PR calamities didn't get much worse than this. Rebecca Merton would simply have to pop this notebook into an envelope and send it to any newspaper in London and the United Nations name would be caked in mud. He could see the headline, across a two-page spread: ‘“My father's wartime hell”, by daughter of UN shooting victim’, complete with full colour photo of ‘raven-haired Rebecca Merton, 31’.
Tom rolled a cigarette, before seeing the wagging finger of the waitress. Of course, London now had the same bloody puritan rules as New York. He kept it unlit and ordered another espresso. He went back to the notebook and girded himself for the next revelation.
I remember very little about those next few days. We moved around as if in some kind of trance. My sister Hannah the least. She did not allow herself to be stunned for very long. She had to be our mother now …
My job was to be the provider of food. I was a child, but I looked older and my looks held another advantage. I could pass for one of the local Lithuanian lads, not marked as a Jew. I would scavenge wherever I could, turning up at a baker's shop just before closing time, my hand out for any scraps. If there was a woman there I would try to catch her eye: women were more likely to take pity on me. ‘Such a sweet face,’ they would say, handing me a loaf-end of bread or a hardened rock of old cake.
‘Where are your parents?’
‘I'm an orphan.’
‘Hear that, Irena? He's an orphan. What happened to your mum and dad, little one?’
‘The Russians.’
‘Oh, those evil animals. And here I am giving you a hunk of stale bread. Irena, fetch that meat we have in the back. Come on, quick now. Here you are, young man. Now you be on your way.’
None of us told the truth. If anyone ever came near Hannah, she would lie outright. ‘My father will be back soon,’ she would say. ‘My mother has just popped out.’ At the time I thought she was simply ashamed to admit we were orphans. Now I understand better. She did not want people to know that in our two rooms, there were only children. She must have worried that someone would send us away or steal what we had. Or worse.
This time, between the Russians and what followed, did not last long. The books say there was, in fact, no time at all, that an advance group of Germans was already there, from the very beginning, even organizing the pogroms the night my mother ended her life. But when the Germans arrived in force, we knew it.
In fact, we heard them before we saw them. I was in the apartment, watching Hannah carve up the crust of bread I had brought into four pieces. As the boy, the man of the house, mine was always the largest. Rivvy and Leah had equal chunks – and the smallest Hannah gave to herself. The girls had learned patience and would eat their food slowly, making even a bite of bread last as if it were a meal. But, at that time, I could not control my hunger. I gobbled up whatever I was given as soon as it was in front of me.
At first, I thought it was a storm. But the sky outside was bright and clear. Yet there it was again, the deep rumble of distant explosions. ‘Shhh,’ Hannah said and we all held still. Hannah closed her eyes so she could concentrate. ‘Aeroplanes,’ she said eventually.
Soon there was a different noise. It was the thunder of an army marching into a city. And then there were sounds that were not nearly so far away. Hard, mechanical sounds of motorcycles and infantry and mammoth field guns on wheels and finally tanks, all rolling into Kovno.
Hannah edged towards the window, not daring to press her face too close. I barged ahead and took a good look. What I saw confused me. The windows of the building opposite to ours, and the one next to it, were opening. Out of them were unrolling large, billowing pieces of cloth: flags. Girls were leaning out, smiling and waving, throwing flowers at the men below.
‘Is everything going to be OK now, Hannah?’ I asked.
‘Maybe, Gershon. Maybe.’ But she looked unsure.
We went to school the next day and I knew immediately that even if our Lithuanian neighbours were glad to see the Nazis, we Jews were not. Everyone was tense. The headmaster spoke to the whole school and his face was carved with anxiety. ‘We are a people who have been tested many times,’ he said. ‘Children, you all know the story of Pharaoh. And of Haman. Men who came to destroy the Jews. And what happened each time?’ No one wanted to answer; this didn't seem like a normal lesson. ‘Each time they failed, because God protected us. We survived. Children, this may be such a test now.’
I'm not sure if it was that day or the next but it happened very soon. Notices went up in German. I stood on tiptoe, my neck craned, to read the one posted on a lamppost near the school, translating it first to the boys in my class and then to a small group that gathered around. The sign said that from now on all Jews would have to wear a yellow star on their outer clothing, to be visible at all times. And there would be a curfew: not for everyone in Kovno, but for the Jews. After dark, every Jew was to be indoors; there were to be no Jews on the streets. And we were not allowed to walk on the pavements. Those were reserved for Aryans only. We would have to walk in the gutter.
Even then, I don't know whether I was scared. These were new rules that we would have to live by, but it seemed better than the Lithuanians and their pogroms. If this was all they planned to do to us – make us wear a yellow star and stay home after dark – then it was better than being beaten on the streets.
But I could not comfort myself like that for very long. A few mornings later, we were woken by a loud banging on the door. I sat bolt upright. My chest was banging. For the first, confused seconds I wondered if it was my mother at the door: I imagined her, smiling, her hair combed and neat, come to take us away from here. I must have been about to say something because Hannah, who was also now sitting up, placed her finger over her lips and fixed me in a glare that told me to keep very still.
The banging on the door started up again, louder and more insistent. We could hear the same noise repeated up and down the corridor and outside on the street too: Nazis pounding on the doors of the Jews.
Hannah got up, grabbed something to cover her nightclothes and opened the door.
He was tall, his back straight. I couldn't stop staring at his boots. They shone like glass and when they moved, the leather creaked.
‘You have ten minutes to gather everything,’ he barked in German. ‘You are moving!’ And with that he turned and headed for the next door. There were more men repeating the same instructions up and down the staircase, above and below us. Now we heard those same words coming from the street below, amplified by a megaphone.
When Hannah turned around her face was serious. ‘Get dressed. Rivvy and Leah, don't just wear one skirt. Wear two or three. As many as you can, one over the other. Do the same with sweaters and shorts. You too, Gershon. As many clothes as you can.’
Then she scurried around the two rooms, shoving whatever she thought essential into suitcases. She moved fast, but she was not panicked. And because she wasn't, we weren't.
After a few minutes she added, ‘You can take one thing each that you really, really want. Just one. Everything else stays behind.’
I reached for a book of adventure stories. Leah grabbed her favourite doll, Rivvy took a hairbrush. And Hannah calmly removed a picture of my parents from its frame and placed it in her pocket. Then she ushered us to the door and closed it, for the last time. We waddled down the stairs: I was wearing four or five shirts and two coats, as well as carrying our largest suitcase. By the time we reached the street, I thought I might boil with heat.
We saw many Jews like us, trying to carry as much as they could. Many were carrying bags of food, tins or sacks of flour. Some had piled up makeshift wagons or trolleys. Hannah scolded herself. She had not thought of that.
Within a few minutes, we were ordered to walk. We would be crossing Kaunas, they said, to our new homes. We were surrounded by men with guns and, more frightening to me, dogs. We did as we were told.
Some people lasted just a few steps. They couldn't carry what they had taken and they began to drop plates and cups, which broke noisily on the ground. ‘Quiet, Jew!’ one of the Nazis shouted. Some of the older people collapsed.
All the time, the Lithuanians stood and watched, as if this were a street carnival. Sometimes they shouted and taunted us. If they saw something they liked they rushed forward and grabbed it. They knew the Germans would not stop them from stealing. I kept on staring at this crowd. And then suddenly there was a familiar face.
‘Antanas!’ I called out. ‘It's me, Gershon!’ It was the boy I used to play ball with; we had had a game a week earlier. But he just stared back at me, holding tight the hand of his father.
A lady began to walk beside us. She said to Hannah, ‘I hear they're taking us across the river, to Viriampole. We're all going to have to live there.’
‘All of us? But Viriampole is tiny.’
Hannah thought the Viriampole district would be too small for all the Jews of Kovno, who numbered in the tens of thousands, and she was right. What she did not know then, none of us did, was that there were more who would be crammed into those few small streets of Viriampole. The Germans had sent army patrols into the countryside searching for any Jews there, looking in every last village, little places like the one whose name my mother would never mention. If they found one Jew here or three Jews there, they too had to move into Viriampole. If a Jew refused to move, he would find his house set on fire. So he moved.
Years later, people always asked us, ‘Why did you obey? Why did you not rise up and resist?’ But we did not know then what we know now. We did not know that we were being marched into a ghetto. I remember thinking maybe things will be better for us if we are all together in one place. At least we will be far away from those Lithuanian murderers.
The walk was long and hard. I kept shifting the suitcase I was carrying from one hand to another, tilting like a reed that was about to break. But I did not stop. I was the man of the family now and I knew that Rivvy and Leah needed me to keep going.
Finally we came to the narrow concrete bridge which marked our crossing into Viriampole.
‘Quickly, quickly,’ Hannah said, shooing us over. I think she was hoping we would not notice the barbed wire and the watchtowers. Or perhaps she was hoping I would have no time to read and translate the German signs that marked the entrance. ‘Plague! Entry forbidden!’ said one and directly underneath there was another: ‘Jews are forbidden from bringing in food and heating supplies – violators will be shot!’
Once we were inside, the soldiers were no longer walking beside us. Now that they had herded us into the ghetto, their job was done. We waited for a few minutes, not just us but everyone. We were waiting to be given some kind of instruction or at least a plan. But slowly the penny dropped. One man broke away from the crowd and dashed into the first entrance he saw. He then appeared from a first floor window and beckoned the rest of his family to join him. Immediately another family followed and then another and then another. It took a second or two for Hannah to understand: this was to be a free-for-all, you lived in whatever corner you could find.
We went to Linkuvos Street with the lady Hannah had been talking to. Later I wondered if Hannah had given her something, perhaps some jewellery of my mother's, because I know Hannah wanted us to be with a family. She understood even then that there would be times when she would need someone else to keep an eye on us. And so we crammed thirteen people into two rooms, the other family and us.
It seems idiotic now, but I remember thinking that, yet again, this would be the end of our troubles. Yes, it was a ghetto. But we were all together and there was work for those who were fit – and work meant food. I lied about my age and got a permit to work. I was twelve now but tall enough to pass for sixteen. And so each morning I would cross the narrow bridge out of the ghetto in a detail of thirty men, all of them older than me. We were given special yellow armbands to wear on our right sleeves, then loaded onto trucks and driven a short distance to Aleksotas, where our job was to build the Germans a military airbase. We had to do the work of machines: lifting rocks and breaking stones. We worked from dawn till dusk, twelve hours or more, until every sinew, every tendon was screaming for rest. We stopped only for a few minutes, to drink thin soup and eat a crust of bread.
But at least it was food. Hannah, though, was struggling to find enough for the others to eat. And the girls were getting sick. Everyone was. The ghetto was so full, maybe thirty thousand people stuffed into an area fit for one thousand. People were sleeping on the streets, even in the cold. The synagogues became dormitories. One morning, I stepped over a man who I thought was sleeping. But he was not asleep. He had died and no one had buried him.
It was around this time that Hannah decided she too would have to get a work permit. If she had one of those precious yellow pieces of paper, then she would earn food for herself but, more importantly, she would have a chance to get out of the ghetto, somehow buy food and smuggle it back in: that way she could feed Leah and Rivvy something more than the starvation rations provided by the Nazis. It was the only way.
I don't know what she did to get that permit. I like to think she met up with the resistance, who were forging papers all the time. But sometimes I think something else. Because Hannah was a pretty girl and when you are hungry and your family is hungry you will do desperate things.
And so Hannah began to leave the ghetto each morning, along with me and the rest of the workers. There were checks at the gate, but the guards were not German. They were Lithuanian police. Perhaps this fact has been forgotten, but the Nazis did not do all this alone. There were very few Germans in places like Kovno. They relied on the local people to help them.
Then came that cruel day, the one that changed everything. Hannah never told me about it in so many words, but I have pieced together what happened and have made myself set down those events here. So that the memory of it will not die.
Hannah got through the check without any problems. She worked in the normal way. But at some point she must have broken away from the rest of the work detail, because when she came back that evening she had some bread. Not a whole loaf, but a chunk of bread that she was saving for our two sisters who had no permits and no food. She hid it under her coat. I think of her now, a little girl standing there with her heart thumping.
Perhaps in the queue at the gate she looked nervous. Something gave her away. Not to the rest of the policemen on duty: they were too drunk to notice anything. But to the son of one of the Lithuanian guards, a boy not much older than me, perhaps thirteen or fourteen at most, who often used to hang around at the gate with his father and his pals. The older men would laugh and joke with him, as if he were a team mascot. He even had his own uniform. But we called him the Wolf, because even though he was so young, he was as cruel as a beast. His face seemed to shine with evil. The smile was wide, baring teeth that seemed ready to drip with blood. Once you saw that face, you could never forget it. The Wolf would plead with his father to let him search the Jews and the men would laugh at his eagerness. That night he asked to search Hannah.
I can imagine how she trembled as he pushed and prodded at her clothes, feeling at her bony frame. He was about to let her go when he gave one last poke, under her armpits. And it was there he found the lump of bread.
The Wolf turned around to the cheering guards like a novice fisherman who has just reeled in a prize trout. Nodding, he soaked up their applause.
‘So what will be your reward, son?’ his father beamed, his truncheon dangling at his side. ‘Name it.’
The Wolf paused while Hannah stood there shivering. The rest of the ghetto inmates stared down at the ground, wanting this moment to be over.
‘Let me punish her myself.’
There was a loud, lecherous roar from the guards. Several placed their left hand on their right arm and pumped their biceps. They began a chant, a Lithuanian song about a boy becoming a man. The Wolf led Hannah to the ghetto cells, where the jailer recognized him. With pride the Wolf explained what had happened; the jailer stepped aside – and away.
‘Take off your clothes,’ the Wolf told Hannah.
Hannah stood still, unable to move.
‘I said, take off your clothes.’
Hannah was cold, her fingers like stiff shards of ice. She did not move fast enough. He punched her in the face. ‘Listen, Jew! I won't tell you again. Take off your clothes!’
Hannah did as she was told and stood there naked with her head down. She would not have seen the Wolf reach for his truncheon and hold it high before bringing it down onto her arms, her back and thighs. Her cries of pain must have sounded as if they were coming from a creature other than a human being. When she fell to her knees, the Wolf kicked her in the face, in the ribs, in the kidneys, in the place she always cherished as the womb of her future children. Soon she lay prone on the floor, waiting for unconsciousness, or death.
Then it stopped. The Wolf seemed to have grown tired, or bored, and he stepped back. Hannah let out a brief sigh; her ordeal seemed to be nearing its end.
There was a clink of metal, the sound, Hannah realized, of a belt being unbuckled. Was he about to flog her?
But now she felt two cold hands on her hips, hauling her up from the floor like a joint of meat. He was not trying to make her stand up, but rather forcing her into a kneeling position, so that she was on all fours.
She could barely feel her legs, let alone move them. She collapsed back onto the floor several times, but each time he pushed her back up. She was confused. Why did he need her to kneel like this?
Suddenly she sensed him near her, too near, his body arched over hers. She heard the unfastening of a zip.
The sudden realization made her scream in protest, but he brought his hand down over her mouth, clamping her jaw tight so that she could not bite, and thrust himself inside her.
How long it lasted she did not know. Her mind left her, it fled to the same place it had gone when she had seen her mother's corpse hanging from the ceiling. She vanished from herself. But then as his assault endured she saw something on the ground, just a few inches away. The mere sight of it brought the decision instantaneously, as if the object itself had determined how it should be used. She would merely follow the impulse that seemed to emanate from this small, random thing: a bent and rusty nail that lay loose on the floor.
She reached for it and curled it invisibly into her right hand, a new resolve powering through her. He was too focused on his pleasure to notice her movement: she could hear him panting and moaning as he struggled to grip her hips and keep her still. She did not hesitate. In a single movement, she pushed back, pulling his arm away from her face with one hand and wielding the nail, held between her fingers like a blade, with the other.
She found his left arm, the one that had been gagging her, its underside exposed. The nail tore through the cotton of his shirt and scored down the flesh. She had never known such strength inside her. It made her roar, louder even than the scream he let out as he felt his arm ripped open.
She shook him away. Instinct made her flee from there as fast as she could, first in a crawl, then in a crouch, grabbing her clothes from the floor. She ran and ran, only noticing once she was three streets away that no one was chasing her. She later told me what she guessed, that the Wolf was too ashamed to admit that he had allowed a naked girl – a snivelling Jewess – to get the better of him. He would claim the deep gash in his arm, which took many weeks to heal, was the result of an accident.
But it was Hannah who was wounded. Not just her face, which was no longer hers. But her soul. She could not be our mother any more. She would stay all day and all night in our small room. I had to keep on working, even though I was now very thin and forever hungry. I would bring back what food I could, deciding at the gate whether I could risk bringing it in. If the guards were drunk, I would try it. If the Wolf was anywhere near, I would pass what I had hidden to someone braver, or more foolish, than me.
Then, in late October 1941, a decree was plastered on every wall and lamppost, announcing that all inhabitants of the ghetto were to gather at six o'clock the next morning at Demokratu Square. No one knew what was coming. All through the night you could hear different sounds coming from the street: religious men praying, women wailing, others feasting and getting drunk, as if to enjoy what they feared would be their last night of life.
I looked to Hannah for advice on what we should do. But she was not the same Hannah. Her eyes were empty, just as our mother's had been. I was the one who took charge, collecting up a few scraps of food, ensuring the girls wrapped up warm. We left our doors unlocked. Those were the orders: so that no one would try to hide.
There was a light dusting of snow on the ground that morning, sleet really, the gloom broken only by the odd candle or lantern. Everyone was holding on to papers, either a work permit or an educational certificate, anything which might prove they had some worth, that they could be of use to the Germans.
We waited in the damp cold for more than three hours until finally SS Master Sergeant Helmut Rauca stood on top of a mound, where he could survey the tens of thousands of people huddled there, and nodded for the first column of people to be brought before him. I noticed there were machine-gun nests all around the square; further away, on the hillsides, stood local Lithuanians, anxious to exploit the good view they had of proceedings.
Rauca was the man to watch. With the tiniest movement of his hand, he would send some people to the left, some to the right. My sisters and I were lucky: where we had been waiting turned out to be the front of the queue. But it meant I had no time to work out the pattern: was it good to be sent to the left or better to be directed right? I couldn't tell.
My sisters and I picked up Hannah and stepped forward. Rauca made a parting gesture: he wanted the girls to go to the right and me to the left. I protested that we had to stay together. ‘As you wish – to the right!’ he barked, with what I thought was a smile.
And then I felt a hand grip my shoulder.
‘Not you,’ a man's voice said.
I turned around to see a policeman. Not a German or a Lithuanian, but one of the Jewish policemen that worked in the ghetto.
I tried to wriggle away from him and join my sisters, who were now being shoved ahead. Rivvy was reaching out for me, but I couldn't grab her hand. Leah began to cry. It was no use though. The policeman was holding me back. ‘Not you,’ he said again.
I began to cry out, pushing and punching at him. How dare this traitor separate me from my sisters? I tried to pull his hand off me, but he held me tighter. Now Rivvy and Leah were screaming – they could see what was happening – but he would not let me go, no matter how much I struggled. My sisters were disappearing deeper into the thick scrum of people sent right by a flick of Rauca's finger. Rivvy and Leah had vanished. The last thing I saw were Hannah's eyes, vacant and staring.
The policeman finally pulled me off and frogmarched me away, down a side alley, until we were gone from the square altogether. I had no idea who this man was or why he had done what he had just done.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#ulink_5e4fe1d1-819d-55ea-9232-52ecb476a418)
Tom rubbed his eyes; the overnight flight was catching up with him. It had been a long time since he had read an individual story like this: case histories, they used to call them. When he had first started at the UN he would pore over such documents, absorbing each detail. After a few years, he would skim read them, seeking only the pertinent legal details. One person's horror story was pretty much the same as anyone else's. But he was reading this one attentively: must be out of practice.
The Jewish policeman – and you must remember we despised these traitors as much as we hated the Germans and the Lithuanians – left me there, where we stood. Once he was gone, I realized the street was completely silent. It was a terrible silence. It was quiet because all the people had gone.
I walked back to our little stretch of Linkuvos Street, past buildings that were now empty and still. I felt as if I was the last child on earth. Four thousand people had gone that day. Everyone else was either outside the ghetto, doing forced labour, or they were hiding. No one was on the streets.
I was twelve years old and I was all alone. I felt jealous of my sisters, imagining them living somewhere new.
I carried on working, still pretending I was sixteen. I did not dare tell even the other workers the truth about my age. Some were nice to me, as if they knew I was just a child. But some were so desperate they were no longer the people they had been. They were so hungry, they had become like animals. Such people would have betrayed me in an instant if they believed it would have made my ration theirs.
I lived in the same room we had shared, though now with a different family. The other lady and her children had been on the convoy to the Ninth Fort with my sisters. Now, the rooms were not so cramped. In fact, there was more space throughout the ghetto, because so many thousands had left. We did not know where they had gone or why we had not heard from them.
Nobody I knew was around. The children I had once gone to school with were all gone. The only familiar face belonged to that policeman who had stopped me getting on the convoy, that pig of a traitor. I only had to look at him to feel revulsion. And yet he seemed to be around often. I would return exhausted after twelve hours working on the building site, my legs and back aching, and there he would be, at the entrance to the ghetto. Or he would be patrolling outside the building where I slept. Sometimes he scared me, the rest of the time he just disgusted me.
Then one night there was a knock on the door. An urgent knock, three times, four times. At first, the woman in the apartment looked terrified. She believed it was the Gestapo. She glared at me in terror. What misfortune had I brought down on them? Had I been seen smuggling?
Then we heard the voice on the other side of the door. ‘Polizei, open up!’
It was the Jewish police of the ghetto. Everyone knew they could be as vicious as any Lithuanian collaborator. I looked over to the window, wondering if I should jump down onto the street and make a run for it. We were two floors up: could I drop down on the ground without breaking any bones? I saw that my hands were trembling.
Before I had even had a moment to make a plan, the woman had made her decision. She opened the door and there he was, the policeman who had pulled me off the convoy some three weeks before. Here, at my door, in the middle of the night.
‘You, boy, come now.’
I was frozen with fear. I did not move.
‘NOW!’
I was still wearing all the clothes I had. You did not dare take them off at night because they might be stolen. I let the policeman lead me away.
He marched me down the stairs and into the street, loudly promising to take me to the authorities for what I had done. I did not understand what I had done.
Eventually, he turned left and right, then into an alley and down an outdoor stairwell to the entrance of a cellar. This, I knew, was not the police headquarters. By now he had stopped shouting about how I was going to be punished. I felt the fear tighten in my stomach.
Then the policeman knocked on the door. Not a normal knock, but in a strange rhythm. Three quick blows, then two slow ones. A voice spoke on the other side of the tiny basement door.
‘Ver is dort?’ Who goes there?
‘Einer fun di Macabi.’ A son of the Maccabees.
The door creaked open and the policeman darted in, grabbing me with him. Inside were three other men, their faces lit by a single candle at the centre of a small, rotting table. To me they looked old, their eyes dark and sunken, their faces gaunt. But now I know they were young, one of them barely twenty.
They stared at me until one, who seemed to be the leader, said finally, ‘It's a miracle.’
Then another nodded and said, ‘He's perfect. Our secret weapon.’
The leader then spoke again, his face harsh. ‘Take off your trousers.’
I hesitated and he repeated it until I realized I had no choice. I lowered my trousers slowly.
‘All the way down! So we can see.’
And once they had seen, the three men all gave a small smile. One even managed a brief laugh. None spoke to me. ‘Well done, Shimon,’ they said and the policeman nodded, like a child praised by his teacher. ‘You have truly brought us a Jewish miracle.’
I had heard about the Jewish underground, but I had not believed it. The kids spoke about a resistance that was coming, how some Jews were trying to get guns to fight the Nazis, even to break out of the ghetto. But we had seen no sign of it. I believed it was a fairy tale, the kind of story boys tell each other.
Now though, I understood where I had been taken. The policeman had called himself a ‘son of the Maccabees’: that had been the password. I knew that the Maccabees had been the great Jewish fighters, the Hebrew resisters who had battled to save Jerusalem.
I was a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy with an uncircumcised penis. I could pass for an Aryan. Perhaps they would use me to smuggle food into the ghetto. I was excited; I knew I could do it. After all, had not Hannah sent me out as a little Lithuanian orphan boy, to beg from our gentile neighbours who might take pity on a gentile child?
But then the leader of the men sent Shimon away and began whispering in Yiddish with the others, oblivious to the fact that I was still there, standing right in front of them. One said they could not afford to wait: ‘The boy has seen our faces.’ Another nodded. ‘He knows about this place. We can't afford to risk it.’ I did not know what they were going to do to me.
Finally, the leader raised his hand, as if the discussion was over. He had reached a decision. Only then did he turn and look straight at me. He told me his name was Aron. ‘Are you brave?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Are you brave enough to perform a task that carries with it a grave risk – most likely a mortal risk?’
‘Yes,’ I said, though of course I had no idea of such things. I was saying what I thought would save me.
‘I am going to give you a task on behalf of your people. You are to travel to Warsaw, to an address I will give you. You will give them this message. Are you ready?’
I nodded, though I was not ready.
‘You will go there and you will say these words. Do not change them, not even one word. This is the message: “Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4”.’
‘But I don't understand—’
‘It's better you don't understand. Better for you.’ He meant that if I were tortured I would have nothing to reveal. ‘Now repeat it back to me.’
‘Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4.’
‘Again.’
‘Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4.’
‘OK.’
The policeman came back into the room and led me away. Standing in the alley outside he told me the plan. He repeated every detail, so that I would not forget.
And so it happened that the next morning I left the ghetto with my work company as always. Except this time that same Jewish policeman was on duty at the gate, to ensure there was no trouble as I peeled away from the others.
A few seconds after I had crossed the bridge over the river, I did as I had been told. I removed the yellow star from my coat and immediately stepped onto the pavement. I was no longer a Jew from the ghetto but an Aryan in the city of Kaunas. I held my head high, just as I had been told.
I walked until I reached the railway station. It was early, there was still a mist in the air. Even so, there was a group of three or four guards standing outside, with one man in an SS uniform supervising them. I spoke in Lithuanian. ‘My name is Vitatis Olekas,’ I said, ‘and I am an orphan.’ I asked for permission to travel to Poland where I had family who might look after me.
As I dreaded, and exactly as Shimon, the Jewish policeman, had predicted, it was the SS officer who took charge. He circled me, assessing me, as if I were a specimen that had been placed before him. One of the Lithuanians asked where in Poland I was headed, but the SS man said nothing. He just kept walking around me, his shoes clicking. Finally, from behind, I felt a tug on the waist band of my trousers.
‘Runter!’ he said. Down.
I looked over my shoulder and saw that he was gesturing at my trousers. ‘He wants to see you,’ said another one of the Lithuanian men, a smirk on his face.
I looked puzzled, as Shimon had said I should, and then the officer barked, ‘Come on, come on.’ Hesitantly, I lowered my trousers and my underpants. The SS officer looked at my penis, eyed its foreskin, then waved me away.
So began my journey, armed with the right Aryan identity papers and a travel document for Warsaw. I can't remember if I pretended to be fifteen or older or younger, but the truth is that I was just a twelve-year-old boy travelling alone through Europe in wartime, showing that precious Kennkarte to Nazi border guards in Marijampolé and Suwalki and Bialystok, over and over again. The Kennkarte made everything possible. It was not a forgery, but the real thing. With that paper in my hand, I was an Aryan. No document was more precious.
And finally I pulled into Warsaw. It was midday and the place was bustling, but no one was going where I was going. My destination was the Warsaw ghetto. Most people then were desperate to break out of the ghetto: I was the only one who wanted to get in.
I dug into the hole I had made in the lining of my coat, the place where I had hidden my yellow star, and pinned it back on. I waited for a group of workers to return and I tagged along. Shimon had promised it would be like Kovno: workers only had to show papers when they went out, not when they came back in.
And so now I was inside streets as crammed and infested with disease as the ones I had left behind. There were corpses in the gutter here, too. But I found the house I was looking for and told them who I had a message for.
‘Tell us and we'll tell him,’ they said.
‘I can't do that,’ I said. ‘I have to give the message to him and to him alone.’ And so I waited.
It was only after the war that I discovered what had prompted my mission, why those three men in the candle-lit cellar sent me away that night. My mission was a response to something that had happened three days earlier.
Some Jews working outside the ghetto had seen a young girl, barely clothed, her eyes wild and staring. She was covered in dirt and smeared with blood; she could say nothing and her face twitched and shook like a mad woman's. They brought her back to the ghetto and once she had been dressed, and had managed to eat and drink a little, she eventually began to speak, though the words came slowly.
She had been one of those pushed to the right at Demokratu Square, along with my sisters. The selection had gone on all day, past nightfall, Rauca on the mound, smoking his cigarette or eating his sandwiches, all the while judging the column of people that shuffled before him, ignoring their cries and blocking out their pleas. Eventually there were ten thousand of them, pushed through a hole in the fence into an area known as the ‘small ghetto’. Some had felt relieved, concluding that this had been nothing more than an elaborate exercise in rehousing. Apparently, people began to argue over who would get which apartment; committees talked through the night, planning for their new lives.
But at dawn the next morning, they realized their mistake. Lithuanian militiamen burst in and began beating and pushing the Jews out of their new homes, herding them into a column and ordering them to march. They were to make the four-kilometre trek to the Ninth Fort, the old encampment built in Tsarist times and designed to keep the Germans out.
It was an uphill walk and it took hours; the aged and the sick falling by the wayside, sometimes helped to their deaths by the rifle-butt of one of the militiamen. The route was lined, from beginning to end, with local Lithuanians, curious to see these strange creatures emerging from the ghetto – just as they had been curious to see us all led inside.
The Nazis had a name for this route. They called it: Der Weg zur Himmelfahrt. The Way to the Heavenly Journey.
They did not arrive till noon and once they had there was no respite. The Lithuanian thugs were quick to grab any jewellery, pulling off earrings and bracelets, and then ordering the Jews to strip naked. Only then did they lead them to the pits.
These were vast craters dug into the earth. Some said they were one hundred metres long, three metres wide and perhaps two metres deep. Others said they were not as long, but twice as deep. Each one was surrounded on three sides by small mountains of earth, freshly dug. On the fourth side, there was a raised wooden platform. And it was here that the SS men stood with their guns.
Those who had survived the march now began to scream; they understood where this heavenly journey had led them. Some tried to escape but they were shot instantly. And so the killing began.
First the Nazis tossed the children into the pit; then the machine gunners, in position for precisely this purpose, opened fire. The women were lined up at the edge of the crater and shot there, in the back, so that they would fall in on top of the children. The men were last.
They killed them in batches of three hundred, with no guarantee that one batch was finished when work began on the next. They had to work fast. Besides, ammunition was rationed so that the Nazis could not afford more than one bullet to the back per victim. And most of the gunmen were drunk.
The result was that many Jews were not dead when they fell; they were buried alive. This was the fate, especially, of the children. But not only them. Those who saw it told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed.
This is the event they call the ‘great action’ of October 28 1941, when ten thousand Jews were driven out of the Kovno ghetto and put to death.
And this is how my sisters were killed.
The girl who had found her way back, shivering and starving, to the ghetto, was one of those who had been buried but not shot. She had passed out as she fell, but some time later she had awoken to the realization that there were corpses all around her, above and below her. She was wedged in by dead flesh, pressing on her so hard it made her choke.
Most of those buried alive were too weak to climb out of the pits, to use the limbs of the dead as rungs on a ladder. They gave up and suffocated under the bodies. Those who did manage to haul themselves out were usually spotted and shot, and this time with no mistakes made. But this girl, she was nervous and cautious. So she waited till the middle of the night, when the drunken chanting and singing of the Nazi gunmen and their Lithuanian comrades had faded into sleep. And so she had escaped, out of the Fort and back to the ghetto.
This was the story she told once she was clothed and fed and could speak. And this was the story which had reached the leaders of the Jewish underground in Kovno, those men in the cellar. Perhaps for the first time they understood what kind of threat they faced. And so they had decided they must spread the word to those who were also trying to fight back. Which was why they sent me to Warsaw.
And so, many years later, I came to understand the meaning of the message I had carried. I also understood why the men in the cellar did not explain it to me. It was not just because I might be tortured. It was also because they did not dare tell me what had happened to my sisters. Perhaps they thought I would have been so blinded by anger, so broken, that I would not have been able to carry out my mission.
But I did carry it out and I met the man I was meant to meet in Warsaw. I waited for him for three hours, but I met him. He was the leader of the underground in the Warsaw ghetto; he too was a young man who looked old.
When I said the words, ‘Aunt Esther has turned up again and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4’ he looked bemused. But then he asked for someone to bring him a book, a holy book rescued from the ruins of a synagogue in the ghetto. It was the Book of Esther, which Jews call the Megilla of Esther. It is the book we read for the festival of Purim, which commemorates a plot many hundreds of years ago to destroy the Jews.
This leader of the underground turned to chapter seven, verse four and then he understood everything. He read it out loud, as if it would help him think. ‘“For I and my people are sold to be exterminated, slain and lost; but if we were only being sold as slaves and maidservants, I would have stayed silent”.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#ulink_04d0d0b8-dfa6-5b07-aead-29e147e534cb)
The more Tom read of Gerald Merton's life story, the more he found himself thinking about Rebecca. How ironic that a woman who seemed to bubble and throb with life, as if she were keeping the lid on an almost volcanic vitality, should have emerged from a world choking with death. She was even named for a grandmother who had hanged herself.
He tried to focus on his task, the job of work Henning Munchau had asked him to do. There was no denying it: the bind from which he was meant to extricate the UN was only getting tighter. They had not only killed a survivor of the Holocaust but apparently one of its heroes: the young boy who, in disguise, had travelled across occupied Europe carrying word of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews.
And Tom had accused him of being a suicide bomber. Thank God he had kept to himself his earlier intuition: that old man Merton, birthplace Kaunas, was some kind of Baltic war criminal who had sought post-war asylum in the UK. He had been as stupid as the German and Lithuanian guards young Matzkin had dodged again and again: he had seen the blue eyes and the uncircumcised penis of that corpse on the pathologist's slab and he had never once considered that he might have been looking at a Jew.
His phone rang; a New York number. If it were Henning, he would explain the depth of the trouble they were in and suggest he needed more time. This was going to require diplomatic footwork of great dexterity if it were not to turn into a grave blow to the reputation of the United Nations.
‘Tom? It's Jay Sherrill. I have some news.’
‘OK.’
‘That New York number we saw on the cellphone? Belongs to the Russian, to the arms dealer.’
‘Really? Wow.’
‘I know. Incredible, isn't it? That's not all. Overnight I had a team do a deep search of Merton's hotel room, unscrewing floorboards, the works. They found something hidden in a wall cavity in the bathroom, just by the extractor fan. Very professionally concealed.’
‘What is it?’
‘A state-of-the-art, compact, plastic-build revolver. Russian. ·357 Magnum calibre. A gun specially designed and marketed to escape detection by security scanners. All you have to conceal are the steel inserts and the bullets; the gun-frame itself gets through unnoticed. Ballistics have examined it. Get this: apparently it's the weapon of choice in the assassin community.’ Tom could hear Sherrill's amusement at his own joke.
‘Hold on, Detective.’ There was the beep of a call waiting. Tom looked at the display: a London number he didn't recognize.
‘Tom Byrne? It's Rebecca Merton. You need to come here right now. Do you hear me? RIGHT NOW!’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#ulink_b5c3ac5e-03f6-517c-9ee9-67e343ad5844)
‘I want to go to the funeral.’
‘I can see the case for that, Secretary-General.’
‘So you think it's a good idea? I'm glad, Munchau. My political staff say it would be unwise.’
‘Why do they say that, sir?’
‘Gowers here says it could be seen as an admission of liability. I said that was a legal point, not a political one. Which is why I was so keen to see you. If you see no legal problem, then we can go ahead. You're the boss.’
At that, the Secretary-General dipped his head in a small, courtly nod as if to say, ‘over to you’. The Time magazine profile had been right: ‘the world's top diplomat has world-class charm’. He embodied everything people liked about the Nordics: wholly professional, yet without Teutonic efficiency; informal, without American over-familiarity; progressive, without Latin fervour. The magazine had said that, just as some argued the Olympics should always be in Athens, so the world would be a better place if the top post at the UN was permanently in Nordic hands. The rotation system wouldn't allow such a thing, of course, but once Asia and Africa had had their turn, and a European seemed possible, then the long-standing foreign minister of Finland rapidly became the obvious choice. The Russians had been expected to object but, to everyone's surprise, they didn't and so Paavo Viren had glided into the post unopposed.
‘Why are you so keen to go, sir?’
‘I think it's the right thing to do. This man was killed on our soil, in our care. I think we have to take responsibility for that and make amends for it. Don't you?’
‘I can see that.’
‘You keep seeing things but not telling me what you think. Please Dr Munchau, give me your opinion.’
Before he had a chance, the Secretary-General's Chef de Cabinet leaned forward to speak. The three of them, plus a note-taker, were in the SG's private office, arranged on the two couches which he had installed within days of his arrival: the essential tools of diplomacy, he had called them.
‘While you think on that, Dr Munchau,’ the Chef de Cabinet began, ‘let me just game out some of the scenarios here. Best case is the SG flies to London, has a handshake and photo-op with Merton's daughter, and that draws a line under the whole episode. Worst case: he turns up for the funeral, gets spurned, maybe even faces protests and barracking and then we've magnified a problem into a larger crisis.’
‘All right, that's enough, Marti. We need to hear what the Legal Counsel thinks.’
‘Well, sir. Strictly speaking, there is no legally meaningful admission implied by your visiting the family. As you say, you are paying condolences simply because this terrible accident happened on our soil.’
‘Good.’
‘But.’
‘Ah, a but. In this building, there is always a but, no?’
‘Such a move will inevitably be seen as an act of contrition. Secretaries General ordinarily attend only the funerals of heads of government or heads of state. For you to go to London would be such an extraordinary gesture, it would imply we had something to apologize for.’
‘Well, we do.’
The Chef de Cabinet looked aghast; Henning Munchau smiled tolerantly. ‘That's not something we would want to say publicly, sir. Certainly not at this stage.’
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