The Final Reckoning (35 page)

One year later

‘And how many displaced people are we talking about?’

‘Maybe a million.’

‘Mainly in Chad, or elsewhere?’

‘Chad mostly.’

‘Conditions in the camps?’

‘They are very overcrowded. Shortages of food. Disease. The biggest problem is panic. Everyone is terrified.’

‘And what are the aid agencies saying?’

‘They have their own problems. Some say they cannot do anything for the victims, when they have the security of their own staff to worry about. The Janjaweed target them, too, you know. Deliberately. And it's working: many of the NGOs have withdrawn.’

Tom pushed back into his chair, chewing at the top of his pen. His concentration was total. But once this meeting was over, he would allow
himself the same thought that kept occurring these days: it was good to be back, absorbed once more in the work he was born to do.

‘I need to look at all the documents you have, all the paperwork. So that we can assemble a cast-iron case. First we need to establish the general circumstances, so that we can paint a picture of the overall humanitarian situation, just the kind of details we've been discussing now. Then we move onto the specifics of each individual. OK?’

It was the fifth Darfur-related meeting Tom had had in the last month. He wondered how long these problems had festered before reaching his desk. He held up his hand, in a request for patience, and turned in the direction of his assistant.

‘Lequasia!’

During the silence that followed, Tom turned to his client and raised his eyebrows – a gesture that conveyed long-suffering patience. He tried again, this time raising his voice. ‘Lequasia!’

At last she appeared, emerging from the back corridor where Tom had added a decent coffee maker to the battered old kettle that used to sit there. In the light, he counted at least four strands of radically different colours in her hair, some plaited, some straight. Or were they simply hair extensions, purchased in that black women's salon just off the Holloway Road?

‘Lequasia, thanks for gracing us with your presence. I hope we're not keeping you from some
urgent appointment with your stylist. Let me introduce you to Ismael Yahya Abdullah.’

She reached over to shake Ismael's hand, her false nails digging into his palms.

Tom went on: ‘He's here on behalf of himself and five other people seeking asylum in this country from Darfur. He's studying at UCL. Since he's been here the longest, and has the best English, he's going to be the point of contact for the whole group. Could you give him six copies of the basic asylum form please?’

Tom said goodbye, leaving Lequasia and Ismael in the waiting area. He turned back to his computer – there was an email to Henning he wanted to finish – when he heard the door open. In truth, he sensed it more than he heard it. First, the chill draught from the street, then the unmistakable shuffling sound that could only mean one thing.

‘Hello, Lionel.’

‘Hello, Mr Byrne.’

‘Julian's actually in court today, but he'll be back soon.’

‘Julian's in court? Why, what did he do?’

‘He didn't do anything. He's a lawyer. He's acting for somebody.’

‘They going to send him to jail?’

‘They might.’

‘Julian's going to jail? Oh—’ and he began to sob.

‘No, Lionel. Not Julian.
Julian's
not going to jail. His
client
might be going. If the court finds him guilty.’

‘He's not guilty.’

‘Well, he might— No, no, you're right. He's not guilty.’ Tom shook his head. Not for the first time in the last few months, he was filled with admiration for his partner in the Kingsland Law Centre. Julian Goldman had endured conversations like this with Lionel and the rest every working day for the last seven or eight years.

‘Do you fancy a cup of tea, Lionel?’

‘That would be nice, Mr Byrne.’

‘It's Tom.’

‘That's a nice name, Mr Byrne.’

Tom was grateful for the chance to retreat to the back corridor and what was laughingly referred to as the ‘kitchen’. No wonder Lequasia was to be found here so often: it was the only hiding place.

As he waited for the kettle to boil he smiled at the absurdity of it. There had been a documentary about Orson Welles on TV the night before: it showed the onetime cinema wunderkind grinning as he confessed that he had started at the top – and worked his way down.

It hadn't been quite like that for Tom. But little more than two years ago he had been one of the top international lawyers in the world, in the inner circle of the Legal Counsel of the United Nations. And now he was here, in a Hackney legal aid practice where the carpet came in thin squares and the client base consisted of the dispossessed and the
unhinged, ‘the migrated and the medicated’ as Julian put it. He was earning around a fifth of his previous UN salary, if that wasn't too generous an estimate – and a much, much smaller fraction of what the Fantonis had been ready to pay him for just a few weeks' work.

When he first met Goldman Jr, Tom had assumed he was a naive young man who would soon learn the ways of the world. But it had been Julian who had taught Tom a lesson: that even if Justice with a capital J was elusive, you could still remedy a thousand little injustices every day – one asylum applicant, or one plastic-bag carrying mutterer, at a time.

It felt much longer than a year; so much had happened. These days Tom struggled even to remember those few, crazed hours in New York. Sometimes he wondered if he had imagined it; his memory of the scene in the meditation chapel particularly so murky. His recollection tended to begin with the immediate aftermath.

Rebecca had not been wrong: the poison had been instantly effective. By the time Henning Munchau and Jay Sherrill were at the Secretary-General's side, he was dead: Tom had killed him before their very eyes.

Tom had had to adopt an almost unnatural calm to explain what had happened. Luckily, there was no time for deception: he had to tell it straight – and he did.

Henning proved himself all over again that day, not only as a good friend but as a first-class lawyer. He methodically ingested all that Tom was telling him, visibly organizing the information he was hearing, even its wildest elements, without losing his steady focus. He summoned two United Nations security officers into the chapel and told them to clear the lobby. The pretext was easy: another security alert. They removed Viren's body – and Henning began to draft a statement.

As Legal Counsel, he insisted there would be no cover-up. The deputy secretary general held a press conference, announcing that Paavo Viren had been killed by former UN lawyer Tom Byrne, the latter acting entirely in self-defence. Viren had lashed out violently at Byrne and his female companion after they had confronted him with evidence of a grave secret, one that an internal UN investigation had now confirmed. Legal Counsel Dr Henning Munchau and NYPD Detective Jay Sherrill had witnessed the killing.

The New York police held Tom and Rebecca for a day, before releasing them under caution. Tom testified that even though the syringe and poison was Rebecca's, she had not intended to kill Viren; she had merely been threatening him, in a bid to elicit the truth. The District Attorney rapidly concluded there was little mileage in prosecuting the daughter of a Holocaust survivor for the death of a man who, posthumously and overnight, and thanks to archive photographs
reproduced on newspaper front pages, on the internet and screened endlessly on twenty-four-hour TV news, had become the number one hate figure in New York and around the world. Besides, the DA added for the second time in a week, since the killing had taken place on UN soil, no crime had been committed under either New York or US law.

In Finland, there was a call for a national day of atonement, so great was their shame in having allowed a war criminal to have sullied their collective good name. In Lithuania, a few thousand ultra-nationalists marched in Vilnius with banners displaying Viren's face, including – incredibly, as far as Tom was concerned – pictures of him as a young man, posing in his black blazer in Kovno. It turned out that Rebecca had been right on this too. There were lots of photographs of the Wolf and they had not been difficult to find.

In Israel, there was a brief flurry of controversy when it emerged that the country's aged president had used his influence to broker the fateful meeting between Rebecca Merton and the Secretary-General. The President said he had simply responded to a request for help from the daughter of a brave survivor of the Holocaust. He was as shocked by the turn of events as everyone else. Truly shocked.

A few weeks later Tom saw an article in
Time
magazine alleging that not everyone had been so
surprised by the Viren revelations.

Tom only half-followed these developments. Once the police had granted their release, he accepted Henning's offer of a hot shower and a bed for the night: Rebecca in the spare room, him on the couch. He had assumed he would fall into a deep, exhausted sleep. But it had not come. Instead his mind had raced.

He had imagined the Israeli president nodding with satisfaction as he watched the TV news in his Manhattan hotel room. In a single day the old man had had both iron confirmation that Gershon Matzkin had not, after all, come to New York to confront him over his betrayal of DIN – and a chance, at long last, to expiate the guilt he had
carried for more than six decades. A chance he had seized with both hands.

Accordingly, Tom detected more than a hint of embarrassment in ‘Richard’, the man who had drugged and dragged them to New York, when they met up with him a week later, as arranged. He had barely been able to make eye contact as he relieved Tom and Rebecca of the papers they had prepared for him, including an extra postcard which featured a cryptic sentence, pencilled in Yiddish. If the president studied it, deciphering the faded markings, he would find the Biblical verse that alluded to his own name. That should be enough, they reasoned, to persuade the aged politician that what could damage him was now in his own hands.

Tom felt a vibration in his pocket. It took a second or two to snap out of his reverie and realize it was his phone. He looked at the display and then looked at it again, just to be sure: Rebecca.

She had only been back in London for a month, after spending most of the last year travelling. She had needed to clear her head, she said. She had been all around Europe and Latin America with a brief stint in South Africa. For a while, Tom had wondered if she was retracing her father's footsteps, a morbid revisiting of his travels as an assassin. But Rebecca insisted it was nothing of the sort: she had been volunteering as a doctor in most of those places. By way of
proof, she told him she had gone nowhere near San Sebastián.

‘Tom? It's me.’

He didn't know how to reply. Her voice alone could still send a charge through him, but now it made him feel wary rather than excited. There was still so much they hadn't said.

Without waiting for him, she spoke. ‘I've just had some sad news. Do you remember Sid Steiner? The man in the old age home?’

‘Of course.’

‘He died last night. In his sleep.’

‘Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.’ He remembered the old boy, playing the piano, his hands fluttering along the keyboard as if he were a teenager.

‘He was the last one, Tom.’ He could hear her voice wavering. ‘There are none left now.’

‘I know.’

‘There's something I need to discuss with you.’ She paused, girding herself. ‘I want to do what my father did, to continue what he started.’

Tom felt his chest seize up. What was she saying? ‘Look, Rebecca. I'm sorry Sid's gone. But DIN has to end sometime. It's not up to you to carry—’

‘No, I don't mean that. DIN is over, Tom. I don't expect you to forgive me for how it ended, but I need you to know that it has. And to know that I will never lie to you again.’

‘I want to believe that, Rebecca.’

The silence held between them. Eventually she spoke again. ‘This is something different I need to
do, for Sid's sake. Something my father always did when this happened. I've never done it before. I'm not even sure I know how. But I'd like you to be with me. At my side. Because you're the only one who knows everything that happened.’

‘What is it you need to do?’

‘I want to remember them, Tom. Sid, my father, Hannah, Rivvy, Leah, all of them. I want to remember them. I want to say Kaddish.’

The Final Reckoning
is a novel – but the story at its heart is true. A group of Holocaust survivors did, in fact, seek revenge for the Nazi slaughter of the Jews in the months and years that followed the Second World War, and they did so along the lines described in this book. They were known in Hebrew as the
Nokmim
, the Avengers, and they consisted of a hardcore of around fifty men and women, most of them former resistance fighters from the ghettoes. Others name the group after its motto –
Dam Israel Nokeam
– which translates as ‘The blood of Israel will take vengeance’ and which abbreviates as DIN.

Their story was first told in English in a truly remarkable book,
Forged in Fury
, written by the former BBC correspondent in Jerusalem, Michael Elkins. Published in 1971, when many of those involved were still alive, it provides perhaps the fullest account of DIN's post-war activities. More detail has come in subsequent years in memoirs
from those involved, including
From the Wings
by Joseph Harmatz, and in Rich Cohen's excellent account,
The Avengers.
An interview with Harmatz published in the
Observer
on March 15 1998 also sheds much useful light.

These sources differ on many of the details but all make clear that there was indeed both a Plan A, a scheme to introduce toxins into the German water supply, and a Plan B, aimed at poisoning former SS officers via a Nuremberg bakery. There is some debate about the number of Nazis killed in the latter operation, but Harmatz – who was directly involved – and others leave no doubt that it happened.
The New York Times
articles from April 1946 detailing the consequences of that effort, articles which Tom and Rebecca read in the internet café, are not made up: they appear in this book exactly as they were published. They can be retrieved from
The New York Times
database.

The record also shows that the Avengers' leader, Abba Kovner, travelled to Palestine – as Aron does in this book – seeking the moral authority of those poised to lead the Israeli state-in-waiting. Kovner met Chaim Weizmann, not only the former leader of world Zionism and soon-to-be first president of the state of Israel, but also a renowned chemist. According to Cohen, Weizmann listened to Kovner before declaring, ‘If I were you, having lived as you have lived, I would do what you will do’ – much as ‘the elder’ in this novel gives his blessing
to Aron. Indeed, Weizmann put Kovner in touch with a young chemist to supply the poison. In Cohen's book, Weizmann knows only of Plan B rather than the much deadlier Plan A; but Elkins implies that the old man was aware of, and backed, the more lethal scheme.

Aron's fate in this novel reflects the fate of the real-life Abba Kovner, who did board a British ship bound for Europe carrying canisters of poison only to be arrested by British military police late in the voyage, forcing him to abort Plan A. Historians of the episode debate who precisely might have betrayed him, but they are convinced – as Kovner himself was – that it was a fellow Jew and Zionist. The individual who gives up Aron in this novel is wholly fictitious. Indeed, I should stress that my imagined President of the state of Israel is not to be confused with the current occupant of that ceremonial office – even though they are both men in their eighties.

Gershon Matzkin is also my own creation, but he is rooted in reality. He is an amalgam of several figures, including Lebke ‘Arye’ Distel – the blond, blue-eyed Avenger who, according to Harmatz and Cohen, applied the poison to the loaves destined for Stalag 13 – and also the man Elkins calls Ben-Issachar Feld (most likely a pseudonym to protect his identity), whom he later dubs ‘Benno the Messenger’. As a young boy, Feld was charged with spreading word of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews. The coded sentence Matzkin carries
– ‘Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4’ – was, according to Elkins, the same cryptic line delivered by Feld.

The description of the Kovno ghetto, and the circumstances leading to its creation, as well as the mass killings at the Ninth Fort, are also entirely grounded in documented fact. The pogrom of June 1941 is detailed in many sources, including
The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews
by Alvydas Nitzentaitis, Stefan Schreiner, Darius Staliunas and Donskis Leonidas. For the account of the ‘Great Action’ of October 28 1941, I was guided especially by
Surviving the Holocaust: The Kovno Ghetto Diary
by Avraham Tory, as well as from eye-witness testimony collated at the HolocaustResearchProject.org website. The image of the pit that seemed to breathe for three days comes from the Rev Patrick Desbois, quoted in ‘A Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews' Fate’, published in
The New York Times
, October 6 2007. George Kadish, the photographer whose work helps Tom finally unravel this story's mystery, is no invention either: all but the last of the Kadish pictures Tom sees can be viewed online.

The fading DIN list of targeted individuals, apparently hand-delivered to Rebecca's flat, features here just as it appears in
Forged in Fury
, with the addition of two fictional names: Joschka Dorfman and Fritz Kramer. The statistics presented by Henry Goldman, detailing the huge numbers of Nazis who escaped justice, are drawn
from the work of Raul Hilberg; the table of figures appears as a footnote in David Cohen's essay ‘Transition Justice in Divided Germany after 1945’, published in
Retribution and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy
, edited by Jon Elster. Inevitably, given the intense secrecy under which DIN operated, it is close to impossible to verify whom exactly the Avengers managed to kill. Some of the names Elkins cited in 1971 would not survive historical scrutiny now. But it is hard to dispute that Nazis across the world were hunted down and killed in their homes, on the streets and in the dead of night – by a group of men and women determined to show the world that Jewish blood could not be spilled cheaply.