A Place Of Strangers (23 page)

Chapter Thirty Eight

The cries of peacocks echoed back from the bare mountain
escarpment beyond the kibbutz garden where Bea and McCall walked arm in arm
through an aisle of palm trees to a bench in the shade.

‘Angry with me, aren’t you?’

‘No Bea, not about my parents... not anymore.’

‘Then about Francis and Arie?’

‘Yes, I am a little...
 
you know I am.’

They found a place to sit and Bea took McCall’s hand as she
had on their very first walk, far away and long ago in the woods of Garth Hall.
Time was a luxury she no longer had and not all her secrets should be buried
with her.

‘We couldn’t child get, Mac... Francis, me.’

‘I know. It must have been so upsetting for you both.’

‘Like you and Helen.’

‘Except Helen did have a baby.’

‘Not yours, though.’

‘No, that’s true...
 
it probably wasn’t mine.’

‘Same as me.’

‘But you didn’t have a baby.’

‘Not baby from Francis, no. Arie baby.’

McCall withdrew his hand.

‘Minsky? You mean you had a baby with Minsky?’

‘Yes, Arie baby.’

McCall stood up so he could look down upon her.

‘God, Bea. You did that to Francis as well?’

He turned to leave but she pulled him back.

‘Listen me, Mac...
 
please.’

She began a disjointed account of how she had met Minsky in
Prague then escaped from the Nazis only to miscarry their child and never be
able to conceive again. Bea met and married Francis later but in those less
enlightened times, she could not risk disgrace by confessing why she was barren
– or that her love for Arie never died.

‘Price of sin, Mac... I paid much.’

Then Francis and Minsky became friends. Francis came to
accept his rival’s part in Bea’s life for he worshipped her unconditionally and
just as she was – imperfectly adorable.

‘Francis didn’t judge me, Mac.’

Maybe he didn’t. But McCall could not forget those childhood
memories of Francis being too bereft to explain why Bea was missing from both
their lives nor his last days when he had called her a witch. But there was
nothing more to be said or done which would make a jot of difference any more.

Bea now intended to stay in Israel for whatever span
remained to her. She wanted nothing of England anymore. All that she had was
now Mac’s. He thought about trying to comb her out some more about the dead
Nazis but Minsky arrived before he could. Neither man had concluded his
business with the other. They drove away in Minsky’s Volvo.

McCall watched Bea in the wing mirror, waving, and getting
smaller every moment.

*

Little was said in the hour or so it took to reach the hotel
in Jerusalem where McCall should have stayed on the night he was abducted. He
paid the overdue bill and retrieved his travel bag then joined Minsky for mint
tea in a café by the Street of Sorrows.

Minsky, open blue shirt, pale linen suit, had a foreign
correspondent’s knack for knowing where best to get watered. McCall unzipped
his bag. He could now even the score and produce his research – the notes,
documents, pictures linking the suspicious deaths that Minsky so mockingly
derided. He caught Minsky smiling.

‘Don’t waste your time, my friend. What you are looking for
will not be there.’

McCall tried not to panic. All the clothes and clutter from
his empty bag lay on the table between them. But Minsky was right. The entire
research file was missing.

‘OK, Arie. Where is it? Who’s got it?’

‘If you’d have played this game as long as me, you wouldn’t
even have to ask.’

‘Look, I’ve been kidnapped and beaten up and now my stuff’s
been stolen – ’

‘– keep calm, Mac.’

‘How the hell can I when you’re having me over like this?’

McCall raged inside, not just at Minsky but at his own
stupidity. He should have had copies made of everything and put somewhere safe.

‘What’s missing is proof of nothing, Mac. It’s neither here
nor there that it’s gone.’

‘But Francis set me on all this. Francis left me the clues.’

‘Dear, dear Francis. He killed thousands of Germans, you
know... bombed them to blazes, innocent or guilty. His mind must have got so
mixed up in the end.’

‘By what, Arie?’

‘Oh, you know... love, grief, remorse. All the usual regrets
that keep the old from their sleep. Come, McCall. Let me show you what keeps me
from mine.’

*

They drove towards the coast in silence, to a museum of the
nearly indescribable. It was closed but Minsky knew how to have any door
opened. Inside was cool and dimly lit for what was on show was alien to the
light of day.

Huge photographs were suspended on boards from the ceiling,
blow-ups of people and places to guide the visitor through a brief moment in
time, from the ghettoes to the gas chambers.

Lodz, Bialystok, Warsaw, Vilna... Auschwitz,
Mauthausen, Treblinka, Chelmno.

So it went on... snapshots from the world’s end. A child
might hold a doll, a woman a fur coat or an elderly man a string bag with all
his life inside it. In their faces could be fear or hope. But naked at the edge
of the pit, they would all look the same. They would all burn.

Minsky stood in front of a cast iron door salvaged from a
death camp furnace. He put the outstretched fingers of his right hand to its
rough blackness, as if to commune for a moment with all those whose lives it
had shut out. Alongside was a large map showing areas the Nazis had made Juden
frei by 1944. A slab of metal, a piece of paper. Nothing connected to
everything.

The only sounds were their footsteps, the tapping of
Minsky’s walking stick, the distant air-con. No clock was needed here. Time was
on hold forever. They paused by a hill of shoes – men’s, women’s, children’s.
All sizes, all colours, lace-ups, button-sided, slip-ons, sandal-strapped. Here
were artefacts from a world as archaeologically lost as Masada and its
skeletons.

Minsky turned one over in his hand... a tiny, calf leather
bootee, white going yellow and as soft as the skin of the baby who would have
worn it. McCall stared across at Minsky, suddenly grown very old.

‘That’s the infinite cruelty for visitors to this place,
McCall – never knowing whose child or wife or parents wore this or touched
that...’

Minsky closed his eyes and put the little shoe to his face
to breathe in all that it was, all that it meant, for he had nothing else to
hold onto.

‘Try to imagine, McCall... all that hatred in your head,
eating away at you like a cancer. How would you deal with it?’

‘I can start to understand someone’s anger, the desire to
have revenge for a great wrong but then to scheme and plan for it over several
years and kill in cold blood... well, that’s a rare form of hatred – ’

‘– but not unknown.’

‘Maybe so but if a Jew murdered some old Nazi this way, it’d
be wrong but people might understand why. What’s harder to figure out would be
a non-Jew’s motivation.’

‘Well, hypothetically, let us say such a person, a woman for
instance, lost a child and blamed the Nazis for her loss and so strongly did she
psychologically identify with the suffering of Jewish mothers that there was
nothing she wouldn’t do to hold those responsible to account.’

‘But Arie, what if this fictional woman needed her non
Jewish husband to help her? Why would he act outside the law and take such a
risk?’

‘Because the deepest love between people is a complex and
uniquely powerful.’

They left the museum’s necrotic imagery and drove up the
Mediterranean road to Akko. It was into the sea off Israel that the ashes of
Adolf Eichmann were dumped after he was hanged and the ghosts of those they had
just left behind could rejoice. McCall said he had been told Minsky played a
part in Eichmann’s capture.

‘No, that’s just gossip. I was never there.’

‘No? Ah, well... but if nothing else, Eichmann proves it’s
better to put someone on public trial than to bump them off in some dark
corner.’

‘In the case of Eichmann, I agree. To see him in his glass
cage before the Jewish people and Jewish judges was hugely symbolic. It proved
the Nazis had failed to destroy us. But not all the cases were like
Eichmann’s.’

*

McCall knew he was being emotionally softened up by Minsky.
They walked the length of Akko’s defensive sea walls, by the groin-vaulted
passageways of the old town where Venetians, Pisans and Genoese quartered
themselves with Jews and Arabs long before the violent coming of the Templars
and Teutonic Knights of the Crusades. Old blood, bad blood. It lustrated the
very stones they trod.

‘You must believe one thing, Mac... I was not born to be a
killer. Parts of my life I regret most bitterly but I had no choice. I was
caught up in the war, in events without precedent and these made me the man I
became in a world where it was barely possible to remain human when everything
around us had become so inhuman.’

McCall did not reply. Minsky’s words felt like a plea of
mitigation to a court in which the context of a crime was being heard before
the offence itself.

And so Minsky began to tell McCall the story of what had
happened to his wife and children and sister amid the trees and picnic places
of Ponar. His source was a neighbour from Vilna who survived against all the
odds, someone who knew his family – and who also found out the identity of a
man in the SS killing squad which had exterminated everyone Minsky loved.

‘That man’s name, McCall... it grew like a tumour in my guts
until it consumed everything I was. I had to find him and I didn’t care how
long it took or what methods must be employed. I would find that man and I
would bring him to my justice.’

‘And did you get him, Arie?’

‘Eventually, many years later, yes... with the help of some
good people and friends who knew the trials in Nuremberg could never settle all
our outstanding debts.’

‘So you confronted this SS man?’

‘In his garage, yes... and he was given a choice. He had the
addresses of his former comrades and we had some petrol and a lighter.’

‘We?’

‘You will get no admissions from me, McCall... it is enough
to say the SS man understood the terms of the deal he was being offered and we
got what we wanted.’

‘So you didn’t have to burn him alive?’

‘No, we resisted that temptation but we went back later and
some adjustments were made to his car and he apparently drove to hell that way
instead.’

‘Christ, Arie. This was Rösler, wasn’t it? Jakob Rösler – ’

‘Who is to say, McCall... though such a man was at Ponar and
such a man took lots of photographs of his brave comrades going about their
daily work.’

‘And such a man died in a car crash, didn’t he?’

‘I cannot say, I wasn’t there.’

‘But Wilhelm Frank and Yanis Virbalis were in that same SS
squad, weren’t they?’

Minsky just shrugged. He would make no more admissions,
however oblique.

‘I wonder, Arie, if the deaths of any of these Nazis eased
your own personal pain or brought back a single one of the six million who
died.’

‘No... it did neither.’

‘So it was all pointless... the most Pyrrhic of victories.’

‘If you say so.’

‘Then why are you telling me any of this now?’

‘Because you’ve no corroboration for anything I’ve said. I
could be making it all up. I’m not going on camera or putting my name to any
quotes for you.’

‘And I’m not going to get my research file back, am I?’

‘They’ll make me Pope before that happens.’

McCall knew he had been out manoeuvred by an infinitely
wilier opponent.

‘But I’ve still got all the footage Francis shot if I wanted
to use it.’

‘Really? Then I must give you my address in Rome.’

‘You mean that will have been stolen, too?’

‘Not by me, Mac. Get that into your head.’

‘Then who?’

‘You won’t want to know this but there’s something at my
house you must see first.’

Chapter Thirty Nine

The basement in Minsky’s house doubled as a bomb shelter in
case of rocket attack from Lebanon or Syria or an enemy who thought Hitler’s
work unfinished. In his heart, Minsky wearied of war. He wished only to die in
his bed, far from the saps and trenches of the front line wherein all his days
had been spent.

That was possible now – but on Bea’s terms. She said McCall
had been through enough and was owed the truth... or as much of it as Minsky
felt able to impart. So the two men sat in a windowless room of books on
military conflict and politics and pictures of Minsky meeting army generals or
alongside tanks or with pilots who had just ruined somebody’s day. This was an
old man’s territory, full of memories but no plans.

‘As soldiers, we were always taught to obey orders – ’

It was enough now for McCall to sit quiet and sip the iced
water he had been given.

‘– but always had the poet in me... thinking for myself, not
really a team player. From the thirties onwards, I was in the Jewish
underground then the war came and I fought with the British only to turn
against them to end British rule in Palestine. We wanted those Jews who’d
escaped the Holocaust to come to Palestine but the British wouldn’t allow it
and the man we came to blame for this was your Foreign Secretary back then,
Ernest Bevin. You’ve heard of him?’

‘Of course.’

‘Well, I was sent to London to kill Bevin.’

The headline brevity of Minsky’s confession was meant to shock.
And it did.

‘But Bevin didn’t get assassinated.’

‘No. I thought my orders were bad politics so I sabotaged
the plan.’

‘How could you do that?’

‘By then I knew Francis and we came to an arrangement. I
gave him Bevin’s life.’

‘You did what?’

‘I gave him Bevin’s life.’

‘In return for what?’

‘First, we Jews avoided creating a whole lot more enemies
which is what would’ve happened if I’d assassinated a big European politician.
Then Francis agreed to give me a bit of unofficial help on something else.’

‘I don’t follow. What could he help you with?’

‘A little bit of rat catching.’

Everyone gained. Francis edged up Whitehall’s greasy pole,
Minsky’s family was avenged, Bevin kept breathing. The cost – a few worthless
lives snuffed out. The arithmetic did not offend men whose generation counted
deaths in millions.

‘So you’re saying Francis was implicated... and by
inference, Bea, too?’

‘I’m saying nothing that can be proved or quoted, Mac. But
if you want to know who’s stolen your material then look no further than the
mourners at Francis’s funeral.’

‘They were just old men – ’

‘– who were Francis’s friends and old colleagues. They’d
prefer their secrets died with them rather than be exposed on television, don’t
you think?’

McCall thought immediately of steely Edgar Fewtrell who had
heard the evil at Nuremberg and of some of the other pensioners at the
graveside, tied till death to the black life of Intelligence.

‘But why would Francis film everything and leave evidence to
implicate you all?’

‘Positive identifications of the Nazis would’ve been needed
first, wouldn’t they? Then I guess Francis wanted some insurance against me.
I’d have done the same in his position.’

 
Minsky went to a
cupboard and took out a video cassette.

‘Anyway, it’s academic now, Mac. When you get home, the
chances are someone will have done a little housekeeping in the dacha.’

McCall’s head went into his hands.

‘...so I’m afraid you’ll always be stuck between what you
know and what you can show.”

Minsky slotted the tape into his recorder and dimmed the
lights.

‘This won’t help you much but Francis sent it to me when his
crisis of conscience began to affect him and we started to worry what he’d do
next.’

We all conk out some time, Arie, and I find myself
doing a bit of cleaning up after myself and the mess I’ve made of things in my
life, not just the war, though God knows how I’ll explain myself at the Pearly
Gates... no, it’s afterwards that’s bothering me. I’m ashamed, shouldn’t have
done what I did... gone along with it for as long but the truth was whatever
Bea wanted, Bea got. I wouldn’t have denied her the moon on a stick if she’d
asked for it but I want you to take care of her when the time comes. She loved
you more... I’ve always known that. I want you to look out for young Mac, too.
I’m leaving him a few clues about what’s nagging at me but there are still
people around who’ll not want him to succeed. He’ll come to you for guidance in
due course so please don’t turn him away. He is my son and you must treat him
as such for all this has cost me my peace of mind. I think that’s everything I
need say so mark my words and find a god to pray to for forgiveness before it’s
too late.

Francis stared hard into the camera then moved out of shot.
Minsky removed the tape.

‘You’ll not need me to tell you this, Mac, but Francis was
the most ethical and moral of men. It was Francis who put a stop to what had
been going on.’

‘How did he do that?’

‘After Canada, he felt it was all wrong and just like you,
he said it wasn’t bringing a single victim back to life. I’ve told you already.
Men like Francis and me, we weren’t born to be killers. We were made to become
so.’

‘Did Bea agree to call a halt?’

‘Not immediately but what Francis was saying got to us. The
emptiness of it all... the brutality. I knew the scales would never balance,
even if I drowned in the blood of all those I held responsible. That’s the
truth of it... and that’s the price I’ll pay till the day I die.’

*

A pair of jet fighters spun over Minsky’s house towards the
border with Lebanon, drowning out the cooing collared doves in his aloe trees.
McCall was alone in the garden trying to unpick Francis’s motives, to make
sense at last of why he had willed him his fragmented story.

Francis could have been exacting revenge on a faithless wife
or using McCall as an instrument of jealously to harm the real tenant of Bea’s
heart from beyond the grave. But that ran counter to everything McCall knew
about a man he loved. Francis was trying to atone. McCall was sure of it.

And in his gathering dementia, he conflated one guilt with
another – that for incinerating all those unseen German civilians with the
greater personal burden of conspiring with Bea and Minsky to bring about the
deaths of three men without the moral or legal justification of war. In the end,
what did it amount to but murder? What else but madness was its punishment?

Minsky suggested a drink in a bar on the waterfront. The
setting sun gilded the ocean and lit the little triangles of sail cloth heading
back to port. Sea birds fell from the evening sky and came amongst the
honey-stoned houses of Akko’s old town. A church bell rang the hour and
children were called indoors. Cats fought, dogs barked and the sea sucked at
the rocks below.

Insofar as McCall knew his story now, he was becoming reconciled
to never telling it. Any public interest was far outweighed by personal harm.
Rosa Virbalis had been right. So had the old cop in Oberammergau.

Minsky carried a dish of olives and bread and two glasses of
beer to their table. They toasted each other – not as friends but as combatants
coming to a truce.

‘Arie, you must tell Bea not to worry. Your story isn’t
going to come out. I’ll only mention it to Evie and her job’s keeping secrets
so it’ll go no further.’

Minsky set his glass down on the metal table between them.

‘I wouldn’t bother doing that, McCall. Evie knows everything
already.’

‘So Bea’s told her, has she?’

‘You really are still concussed, aren’t you?’

‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’

Minsky leaned forward and took McCall’s hands in his own.

‘It was Evie who traded you in, my friend.’

‘Evie... ?’

‘Yes... how else could the mourners have got into you?’

‘No, no, you’re wrong, Arie. She wouldn’t do that.’

‘I’m afraid Evie has other loyalties, Mac.’

‘Look, Evie’s coming to live with me... in Garth. That’s the
plan. Honestly. We’re setting up home together directly I get back.’

‘Listen, Mac. Evie’s got a husband... he teaches history at
University College.’

‘No, she’s had boyfriends, but – ’

‘– Evie’s moved back in with him. His name’s Phillip, lives
in Clapham. Her flat’s already been re-let.’

McCall stared back at him blankly. He suddenly felt Evie’s
kiss on his cheek. Then a great sadness and a sickness for home swept over him.
He wanted to be away and out of this foreign place, to be far from its lies and
to be beneath the trees of an ancient wood where the wind blew and the water
ran and the spirits of childhood might return him to all those secret places he
had lost. Arie Minsky understood this and held McCall as a father might, close
and tender, for he more than anyone else in the world knew that neither of them
would ever find their way there again.