Sons and Daughters (25 page)

‘Seeing what all the fuss is about could call the lady’s bluff,’ smiled Boots.

‘Give her a thrill, more like,’ said Cassie. ‘When I was talking to my dad about her, he said she was probably what was known as a voluptuous woman. Well, you should have heard what mum said to that, including telling him she wasn’t going to have those kind of words used in her house, especially
in front of an innocent daughter. Me, the innocent daughter, Boots.’ Cassie laughed again.

‘Innocent daughters, Cassie, grow up like the rest of us, but I’m never sure if some fathers wouldn’t prefer them to stay young and innocent for ever,’ said Boots.

‘Is that what you’d prefer for Gemma?’ asked Cassie.

‘Shouldn’t we all allow our children to choose their own way of life?’ said Boots.

‘But we’ve got to give them some guidance,’ said Cassie.

‘Yes, so we have,’ said Boots, and spent a few moments reflecting on that which was foremost in his mind. The woman and her husband, both said to be Polish. If her husband really was Polish, did he know she wasn’t? As a Pole he should know. ‘This woman Mrs Kloytski, what’s her husband’s job, Cassie?’

‘Oh, he works mostly at home, writing articles for a Polish newspaper, and going up to town to meet other Poles,’ said Cassie. ‘He’s got a phone. Freddy’s arranging for us to have one, which I said wasn’t before time. Boots, I’m just bursting with curiosity.’

‘Well, don’t go off bang, Cassie,’ said Boots, ‘none of us want to lose you. Hang on for a while, and then perhaps some news will come your way and satisfy your curiosity. Thanks for your time and our chat. I must go now.’

‘Boots, it’s been lovely seeing you,’ said Cassie, ‘and all the best to Polly and the twins.’

‘Come and have Sunday tea with us, you and Freddy and your children,’ said Boots. ‘I’ll ask Polly to get in touch with you about the date.’

‘Boots, we’d love that,’ said Cassie, and tingled when he gave her a goodbye kiss.

Farther along the street, Mr and Mrs Kloytski were eating lunch, a large dish of sauerkraut being the mainstay.

Boots, on his way to the Walworth Road and a pub, suddenly thought about the sauerkraut that Ma Earnshaw had mentioned. Did Poles like it as much as Germans did?

Mrs Rachel Goodman, a forty-seven-year-old widow, was as well preserved as Susie and Polly. A strikingly beautiful Jewess in her younger years, lush in her vivid looks, she had avoided the traditional foods that were so appealing to her race, but could be fattening. She had a decided horror of being called fat by Sammy. Not that he would in bald terms, not Sammy, the dear man. He’d make do with something like, ‘Hello, Rachel me old lollipop, you’ve been eating well lately, I see.’

No-one knew that since the age of fifteen she had been in love with Sammy the irrepressible, or that only her affection for and her dutiful attitude towards her gentle-mannered father would have prevented her converting to the Christian faith if Sammy had asked her to marry him. Sammy, however, had never thought of subverting her faith, and so she did the dutiful thing and married Benjamin Goodman, an up-and-coming bookmaker and a fine man in many ways. She had lost him when he died of a heart attack during the war. She put that down to the time when, as an ARP
warden, he had entered a bombed house during a German air raid in an attempt to bring out a trapped woman. The trembling house fell on him, and on the woman and another warden. Both Benjamin’s legs had been broken. Rachel was sure the shock, the stress, and the painful road to recovery had weakened his heart.

He had been gone now for several years, leaving her to take care of their two daughters and her widowed father. Her father, ageing but enduring, was still with her. Rebecca, her elder daughter, a university graduate, worked in the research department of an international chemical company in Manchester, where one of the managers, Joseph Symonds, was doing his best to interest her in a wedding ceremony at the city’s main synagogue.

Leah, her younger daughter and such a sweet girl, had done something that delighted Rachel. She had married Edward, the younger son of Sammy’s sister Lizzy, thus allowing Rachel to relate to the extensive Adams family. Rachel, despite the strict tenets of her religion, was enduringly close in every way to this Christian family, to its attitudes, its customs and its patently old-fashioned values. She had a warm affection for Sammy’s mother and her many descendants and in-laws. Further, she and Boots’s wife, the once madcap Polly, had always hit a high note together.

Rachel had been Sammy’s business manager during the latter years of the war, a position she happily relinquished back to Boots when he returned. She was now the secretary of all three
companies, Adams Enterprises, Adams Fashions and Adams Properties, and her salary gave her immense pleasure, even if Sammy sometimes said, ‘You sure we’re not paying you twice too much, Rachel?’

Sammy was the driving power of the business, its engine, but Boots, she knew, was the mastermind of its stability. Sammy periodically came up with great ideas, and laid them before Boots and herself with the flourish of finality. But Boots, in his casual but subtle way, would offer a few comments, and those comments would govern the outcome. Rachel loved her job and adored all that Sammy and Boots meant to her working life.

Boots was back after an extended lunch hour. Rachel thought that he and Sammy, so tanned and fit after their time in Cornwall, could put many a Hollywood star in the shade. But I’ll admit it, I’m biased, she told herself. She put her head into Boots’s office.

‘Maggie Collier’s been after you,’ she said, entering. Maggie Collier was chief buyer of women’s clothes for Coates, who had a store in the West End and branches all over South England. Maggie Collier was the post-war replacement for Harriet de Vere, who had suffered treacherously from weak knees whenever face to face with Boots. Rachel suspected the same weakness was afflicting Maggie.

‘Rachel,’ said Boots, regarding desk paperwork absently, ‘suppose we throw the lady at Sammy?’

‘She’ll bounce back in your direction,’ said
Rachel. ‘My life, aren’t you ashamed at what you still do to perfectly respectable women?’

‘If I did do it, God knows how they’d rearrange their respectability,’ said Boots. ‘What’s Maggie Collier after besides me?’

‘Somehow,’ said Rachel, ‘she’s got wind of the fact that we’re on course for manufacturing a glorious amount of nylon stockings. And we are now that the machine’s installed and Tommy has it working like Frankenstein with six arms. Maggie wants to contract totally.’

‘I suspect that,’ said Boots.

‘You’re right,’ said Rachel. ‘She wants Coates to have the lot.’

‘Ring Tommy,’ said Boots. ‘Ask him to estimate the output. Then ring Maggie and offer half the total. Tell her, of course, that it’s the lot.’

‘I should put my head on Maggie’s block?’ said Rachel. ‘It’s your head she wants, on her West End necklace.’

‘Favour me,’ said Boots, who knew that if he spoke to the lady himself he’d get invited to a three-hour lunch.

‘I’ll do it for you, Boots,’ said Rachel, ‘and risk the bruises.’

Later, when Rachel had survived her phone conversation with Maggie Collier, Boots was talking to Sammy.

‘You want what?’ said Sammy.

‘Immediately our day here is over, I want you and Tommy to come to Walworth with me,’ said Boots. ‘I’ve phoned Tommy and he’s leaving the
factory early to be here by five thirty. In a case like this, three can operate more effectively than one.’

‘What case you talking about?’ asked Sammy, up to his ears in property-speculation figures on paper.

Boots said that at Belsen he came face to face with the men and women SS guards, and that one woman in particular attracted his attention by way of her cold, contemptuous defiance and total lack of remorse. She was supposed to have ended up at Nuremberg, to be tried, along with all concentration-camp guards, as a war criminal. That hadn’t happened. She’d obviously escaped, as some other known war criminals had, and was living in Wansey Street, posing as the Polish wife of a Polish man.

‘Wansey Street?’ said Sammy. ‘Not next door to Cassie and Freddy, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Not far from them,’ said Boots.

‘Send the police round,’ said Sammy.

‘Sammy lad,’ said Boots, ‘it’s my personal job, something I owe to myself and the victims of Belsen and Himmler.’

‘Funny thing, I never did go much on Himmler,’ said Sammy. ‘Always looked like Monday’s leavings to me. Well, a sort of leftover from a dog’s dinner. Lucky we had a fortnight in Cornwall and had our muscles toned up. I mean, has this female got muscles of her own and is she handy with her coal hammer?’

‘You can expect that,’ said Boots.

‘Well, I don’t usually like laying hands on a
female,’ said Sammy, ‘but as it won’t be in business hours and it’s personal to you, I’ll come along. I’ll ring Susie and tell her I’ll be delayed a bit. Has Tommy phoned Vi?’

‘He said he would, and I’ve spoken to Polly. I fancy, Sammy, that we’re all going to be delayed a bit.’

Polly had responded to Boots’s phone call by saying she had a fat chance of being right behind him if he was sneaking off without her. Sorry, Polly old love, said Boots, but you look after the twins and I’ll look after Mrs Kloytski. Take care, said Polly, we don’t give a damn what happens to Himmler’s filthy vixen, but you’re our Rock of Ages.

That evening, Mr and Mrs Kloytski heard a knock on their front door.

‘I’ll go,’ said Kloytski.

‘See who it is before you let them in,’ said Mrs Kloytski.

‘Of course,’ said Kloytski. Arriving at the door, he put his right eye to the spyhole. He stiffened, alerted and retreated. ‘God damn it,’ he hissed, ‘it’s the English swine himself, the one we knew as Colonel Adams, and he’s not alone. I glimpsed other men.’

‘There, I told you he could have recognized me that day in the market,’ breathed Mrs Kloytski. ‘Don’t let them in.’

‘I’m not an idiot,’ said Kloytski as the knock was repeated.

‘What shall we do?’

‘Stay quiet until we’re sure he’s gone,’ said Kloytski, ‘then do some packing and depart as soon as it’s dark.’

‘What if he fetches the police and they force an entry?’

‘At the sound of the first blow, we’ll have to slip out through the back,’ said Kloytski. Again the knocker thumped.

‘Into the back yard that’s hemmed in by other back yards?’ said Mrs Kloytski.

‘We’ll turn them into an escape route somehow,’ said Kloytski.

They waited. There were no more knocks. Kloytski took another look through the spyhole. He saw nothing. He went into the parlour, and made a cautious survey through net curtains. The street was empty.

At that moment, Boots, Tommy and Sammy were with Cassie and Freddy, with Boots doing the talking. Subsequently, Tommy called on Mr and Mrs Hobday.

Thirty minutes later, when Kloytski and his wife were upstairs hurriedly packing, their knocker sounded again.

‘They’re back,’ said Kloytski.

‘I’ll take a look,’ said Mrs Kloytski. She descended the stairs quietly, Kloytski following. Through the spyhole she saw Cassie, a neighbour with a very attractive and decidedly masculine husband. ‘It’s only Cassie,’ she said, and opened the door.

‘Oh, hello, Mrs Kloytski,’ said Cassie, a dish in her hand, ‘I’ve brought you some—’

Figures materialized at speed from the step next door. Kloytski turned in the narrow hall and bolted for the kitchen as Boots and Sammy, rushing past Cassie, landed on the mat to confront the paralysed blonde woman. Sammy took a brief look at her, saw the staring blue eyes, then went after the man.

Boots closed the door. Cassie, pulse jumping, went back to her house to tell Freddy she had played the part that Boots had asked of her.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ said Boots to the blonde woman. ‘At Belsen.’

Kloytski was unlocking the back door. Except on the occasions when he or his wife needed to put something into the dustbin, it was always kept locked, even though it only opened onto a back yard. All back doors could be vulnerable.

Opening this one, with the sound of pursuit at his back, he tensed himself for a dash to the wall and a leap over it. Out he went. Tommy, who had climbed the wall from the Hobdays’ yard, was waiting for whoever emerged. Seeing it was a tall, arresting man who could obviously look after himself, Tommy delivered a thumping punch to his stomach. The man let out an agonized gasp, doubled up and collapsed.

‘Sorry about that,’ said Tommy, ‘but I had orders.’

Out came Sammy. He looked down at the writhing man.

‘What’s he fussing about?’ he asked.

‘Search me,’ said Tommy, ‘I just gave him a tap, that was all.’

‘Is he the Polish gent?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Tommy, ‘but Boots said not to do fairy dances with him.’

The writhing man was mouthing audible imprecations.

‘Dear, dear,’ said Sammy, shaking his head, ‘I don’t know what language he’s using, but I do know Chinese Lady wouldn’t like it. Let’s wrap him up. Boots said to.’

‘Now and again,’ said Tommy, ‘Boots will keep playing God.’

Boots had the woman in her parlour now. Her face was white, but her blue eyes were full of the fire of hatred.

‘You’re German,’ said Boots.

‘Yes, I am German,’ she hissed, ‘and better than any of your women. The English? Pah!’ She spat. ‘Wait, only wait, and Germany will rise again and this time do what our race was born for, become masters of the world.’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Boots, ‘you don’t have the right knack of empire-building, only a talent for exterminating people.’

Sammy and Tommy appeared, with their prize, whose wrists were lashed behind him, his face livid, his strangely expressionless eyes bulging. Boots looked at him. Recognition arrived at once. God Almighty, thought Boots, he escaped Nuremberg too.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ he said, ‘Major Kirsten of Himmler’s SS, I believe.’

This was the man sent by Himmler to arrange the despatch of all surviving inmates at Belsen.

‘And you,’ said ex-Major Kirsten between grinding teeth, ‘are the most cursed of men.’