The final reckoning, p.23
The Final Reckoning, page 23
The other four in our group opened up their bags and pulled out the paintbrushes. The first dipped the bristles in one of the full metal bowls, letting them absorb the liquid. He looked at me, waiting for guidance. I showed him to the wheeled rack, gesturing at the top row and, methodically, he started painting on the poison, loaf by loaf.
Soon we had a rhythm, a veritable production line as Rosa and I ensured at least five bowls were full of poison at any one time, shuttling again and again to various hiding places under the floor for fresh supplies.
Every ten minutes or so, Aron passed through the drying room but he could not stop for long: he had to maintain the charade of loading up the truck with sacks of sugar and flour. He could not let the bakers, gagged and bound inside, know that anything was going on inside the drying room. For that reason, we worked in silence and only occasional whispers.
The day itself had dragged but these two hours – less, of course, by the time we actually started – flew by. We were sweating through it, each of us possessed by the same fierce desire: to poison as many of those loaves as we could in the time. I counted the racks we had done and I estimated we had painted arsenic onto about three thousand.
Then Aron joined us, gesturing at his watch. It was quarter to five; the American trucks would arrive in fifteen minutes. He urged us to pack up. I began putting the unused bottles of poison back in their hiding places under the floorboards. Of course they would be found eventually, but by then, with luck, it would be too late to matter.
I hid the last bottle and caught my hand on a spike sticking out of the floorboard I had been trying to replace. My hand began to bleed. I was pressing the board in, harder and harder, but it would not stick. And now a pool of blood was spreading.
‘Come on!’ Aron said in a loud whisper, glaring at me. It was three minutes to five. The trucks would be here any second. Yet I couldn't leave, not while blood and an uneven floorboard were calling out to be noticed, advertising the poison hidden below. If I at least removed the bottle, then, even if they looked, the Americans would find nothing. They would assume this was just damage caused by the intruders as they went about their business.
I looked around. Everyone else had gone, Rosa and the rest of the poison team were all outside, in the truck by the loading platform waiting to go. Only Aron remained, now looming over me. I was on my knees, trying to retrieve the hidden bottle. He looked as if he was about to knee me in the face, to knock me out and drag me into the truck.
But when he saw the blood and the stubborn floorboard he understood. He shoved me out of the way and, in a single jump, he let his entire weight land on the uneven plank of wood. Still, it would not settle. We now had less than two minutes.
He stepped out of the way and gestured for me to remove the poison. Once I had, he wheeled over one of the racks and placed it over the board and the bloodstain. There was nothing else we could do.
He then marched out, heading for the truck. I was behind him and was already outside, in the loading area, when I saw it – lying on one of the steel counters, too close to the loaves not to be suspicious. An oversized paintbrush, too large and crude to be used for glazing pastries. In all the haste to rinse out and hide the mixing bowls, clearing them of arsenic, as well as filling our bags with the empty bottles that had once contained poison, someone had forgotten the biggest and most obvious piece of equipment. I rushed back and grabbed it and when I turned around I saw our leader, now crouching with the others in the back of the truck, aiming his pistol at me.
I realized then that if I had taken even a second longer he would have shot me in the back. Any further delay caused by me would have been simply too costly: better to kill me and leave me on site. It would not even have looked suspicious. The apprentice boy killed in the course of an armed robbery on a bakery. That, after all, was our cover story.
The Americans would untie the workers and draw the obvious conclusion. Armed thieves had come to steal the sacks of flour and sugar and huge quantities of yeast they knew were held within, filling their truck with the hoard and making off just before the Americans arrived at dawn. It would be no great surprise. Foodstuffs and raw materials fetched a good price on the German black market of 1946. The workers, gasping for breath and nursing the welts on their wrists, would tell them all about it. ‘It was an inside job,’ the manager would say. ‘That little Polish bastard let them in.’
The others would explain how the robbers had taken their time, stripping the place of everything that had value. The Americans would offer consolation, shake their heads at the loss of such costly resources and, perhaps, call for a military policeman to come and investigate. But they would not be diverted from the task of the morning. They had thousands of men to feed in Stalag 13 and – yes, look over here – as luck would have it, the intruders came in after baking time. The loaves are all here, stacked and ready for loading: the bread, at least, they did not steal. Well, our sympathies, gentlemen, but we need to be on our way.
That, anyway, was the plan, dreamed up by the Frenchman and pushed and pulled, kneaded and twisted, over weeks and weeks more thoroughly than any loaf I ever made in that bakery. Aron attacked the plan from every angle, each day thinking of new objections. But once he had thought of answers for everything – Rosa for the night-watchman, Manik for his corpse – he had decided that it was the only way. We would commit one commonplace crime – common at least in the chaos that was Germany after the war – in order to commit a much greater, more noble crime. One that was not, of course, a crime at all.
The truck travelled south, where Manik found a deserted spot to hide it. We would be fine so long as no one found the truck, or connected it with the robbery in Nuremberg, until it was too late. It would be a mystery why black market thieves had simply abandoned such precious booty, but that was a mystery we could live with. Besides, that little puzzle would be a perfect decoy, a false trail that would delay anybody coming after us.
The rest of us got out a few miles from the bakery and simply waited by the roadside: the city was already waking up by then, men making their way to the morning shift and, before long, a couple of taxis came by. We got in and Aron handed the driver a wad of notes and told him to take us to the Czechoslovak border.
Only Rosa stayed behind, to do one last job. Once more she had to act, but this time she would not play a slut or a whore. Instead she simply had to wander among the quiet, residential streets that surrounded Stalag 13, homes rented by the wives of the Nazis waiting to stand trial. She would pretend to be just such a wife as she stopped to ask women whether the rumours were true, that many of the prisoners had suddenly been taken ill. Some of these loyal maidens of the Reich stood sobbing with her, as they told her she was right: the hospital was full of their brave men. The doctors couldn't cope, more men were admitted than they could treat, all of them suddenly struck down by the same terrible plague. ‘What is it?’ Rosa would ask. A complete mystery. Food poisoning, the Americans said, but who knew whether to believe them. But it was serious. ‘I don't want to worry you, dear, but some of the men seem close to death.’
Rosa reported all this back to us, together with whatever scraps of information she could pick up. She had broken off with the mess sergeant a few weeks earlier. I liked to think that was because she had extracted all the information we needed and she ran from him as soon as she could. But I think Aron had told her to do it: if they were still together, he might become suspicious.
And, eventually, there were official accounts, in the newspapers and so on. We didn't believe every word: we knew they were censored and suspected the Americans would want to cover up what had happened. If they had not managed to protect the men they were holding, it did not look so good.
But the reports, including Rosa's, left no doubt. The poisoned loaves had got through and the Nazis, in their thousands, had eaten them. How many had died? We never knew for sure. It might have been three hundred or seven hundred. It might have been a thousand or even several thousand. Aron said the exact number did not matter. What was important was that the Nazis held in Nuremberg would have understood and, eventually, the world would have understood, too, that the Jews had not accepted their fate, but had come back to claim their revenge. That the story of Stalag 13 would live on and that no one could say again that we had been sheep to the slaughter. I tried to accept what Aron said but I cannot lie. I wanted to know, and I never stopped wanting to know, even years and years later, exactly how many Nazis had tasted that bread I had helped bake, that bread I had helped poison, how many had tasted it and died from it. I wanted to know if their death was painful. Above all, I wanted to know that among the thousands or hundreds or even dozens dead, was the man who killed my Hannah, my Leah and my Rivvy, my sisters.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Jay Sherrill wanted nothing more than to sit down. The information from Agent Marcus Mack of the New York Police Department Intelligence Division was coming too fast to take in, at least too fast to take in like this, walking on a busy Manhattan street in late afternoon, jostled by shoppers and commuters and street vendors, pretending to talk into a cellphone, unable even to look his source in the eye. This was not how Detective Sherrill liked doing business.
‘So when you say, from the beginning, you mean from the beginning.’
‘Uh-huh. Reckon I was the first agent put on it. In the morning, anyway. Obviously surveillance had been monitoring him since the previous night.’
‘When he met the Russian?’
‘Right.’
‘And they put that together with his location-’
‘Near the UN.’
‘-and on that basis he became a suspect. A terror suspect.’
‘Which is why I was following him.’
‘And you say there was another man, another agent?’
‘At least one.’
‘What do you mean, “at least”?’
‘Well, I know for certain there was one other guy, because I saw him when we got to UN Plaza. We saw each other; we both had the same reaction.’
‘But?’
‘But my handler said, when I asked whether there was back-up, “There's a team”. Now, he coulda been shitting me, they're not above that, these guys.’ For a fleeting second, Mack eyed Sherrill, at his left, then looked forward again as he kept walking. ‘You know what I mean, Detective? Saying “there's a team” when really they mean, there's you and me – we're the team. So it may have just been me and this other guy, the one I saw when I got there.’
‘Did you speak to him, this other agent?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘What does that mean? Oh, excuse me, sorry.’ A woman carrying a cappuccino-to-go, and also talking into a cellphone, had banged into him and, naturally, he had been the one to apologize.
‘It means we didn't exactly have a conversation, but we spoke.’
‘To each other? To someone else? Who?’
‘No, we said something at the same time. That's when I realized. Look: back up a second. Remember, I told you that when I got to the Plaza, I could no longer tail the guy, because he had entered another jurisdiction? He was on UN turf so I just had to hang back?’
Sherrill nodded.
‘OK. So I watched what happened. I saw the suspect walk into the centre of the Plaza, kinda looking around and then I see the UN guard reach for his weapon. And exactly at that moment, the suspect turns around and faces my direction. And that's when I see it. What I hadn't been able to see the entire time I was tailing the guy.’
‘You saw his face.’
‘Exactly. I saw his face. And I realized it instantly, the mistake we had made. I mean this guy was old, really old. There was no way he was a terrorist. He was a senior. And I know what's happening here. The guard's had the warning, the description, and this old man fits it perfectly. Black hat, black coat. He fits it. And he's just got our warning, my warning, that the suspect is about to enter UN territory and so he's reaching for his weapon. He's thinking to himself, I got Muhammad Atta here, I gotta blow him away.’
‘So you try to stop him?’
‘I try and stop him from shooting. I wanna shout, “You got the wrong guy!” Now that I've seen his face, I know he's the wrong guy. But there's no time. The only word that comes out is “No!”’
‘And at the same time, another man does the exact same thing.’
‘Right. The same word at the same moment. And that's how I know that that guy, maybe five yards from me down the street, is also a cop, an intel agent. Because he's realized what's going on, same way I have.’
Jay clenched his teeth. He was remembering Felipe Tavares's testimony two days ago. Why had he started shooting? ‘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.’
‘The black man he saw, that was you,’ Sherrill murmured.
‘What's that?’
‘Nothing.’ Sherrill was turning it over: Tavares had worked it out afterwards, when it was too late, after the bullet was already plunged deep inside Gerald Merton's chest. Only then had he understood that the black man, and the white man near him, had been trying to stop not a bomber but him, Felipe Tavares, from shooting an innocent man.
‘Did you talk to the other agent?’
‘No. We kinda looked at each other, as if we both understood. Then we did what the rules say you do in that situation.’
‘Which is?’
‘You scoot. Opposite directions. You never want to make contact, not if you're both undercover. Could blow it for both of you.’
Sherrill remembered his last exchange with Tavares, how the security guard had said that both men had vanished. ‘OK,’ he said, unsure where to move next. ‘And you've been thinking about this ever since?’
‘You could say that. Look, it was me who called in that the “suspect” had moved into UN Plaza. And it was me who freaked out the UN guy by shouting “No”. It was those two things that made him think he was dealing with a suicide bomber.’
‘So you feel guilty.’
‘The word I would use is responsible. That's what I am, responsible. And it's not just me. That's what you gotta understand. I was only on this guy's tail because we had intel on him connecting him with the Russian and all that bullshit. So it ain't just me who's responsible here, you know what I'm saying?’
‘Who else?’
‘Who do you think? I'm talking about the New York Police Department Intelligence Division, that's who. I can see what's going on here. I've noticed how Intel have suddenly gone very quiet. They're not saying a word, nah-uh. Letting a few fucking Belgians over at the UN take the rap. Well, that, my friend, ain't right. And I don't intend to let them get away with it.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Tom was staring. Not, for once, at Rebecca, but at the man sitting two seats away from her.
There was no reason to gawp. He was just a guy tapping away at a computer screen. But something about him had stopped Tom short. He seemed out of place here; too well dressed, not poor enough…
They were in an internet café on Kingsland High Street, just a few hundred yards from Julian Goldman's shabby legal aid practice and only a ten minute walk from the Brenner Centre, home of the near-senile Sid Steiner.
It had been Tom's idea to come here. They could hardly go back to Rebecca's flat, he had said: whoever was pursuing them could be there, waiting. It was a risk even to use his computer there: their stalkers would doubtless be able to hack into it and see whatever they were seeing.
So he had suggested coming to this place. ‘Internet café’ was not quite an accurate description. Coffee was available from a sorry-looking vending machine in one corner, a mess of sachets, crusted sugar and discarded stirrers. But otherwise it looked no different from any other shabby shop, the display window entirely covered in stickers promoting discounted rates for calls to Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Addis Ababa. One wall was divided up into telephone booths, each partitioned off by the flimsiest, palest, plastic imitation of wood. They were all full, the soundproofing so basic that the babble of conversation, in a dozen different languages, was loud and constant. Inside were young men, none older than thirty-five, Tom reckoned. He could imagine the longing expressed in these phone-calls to wives, mothers and children back home, people whose livelihoods depended on cash remittances sent from London and whose hope depended on these phone calls. The sound of it was unmistakable. It was the sound of desperation.
The terminals were all in use too, with pretty much the same clientele. Tom's years at the UN meant he could make a pretty good guess at the range of nationalities gathered in the room: Kenyan, Somali, Sudanese would have been his initial estimate. Their presence here said something depressing about their presence in London: that they had not come anywhere close to settling in, that everything they cared about was elsewhere. They were like landless people, just passing through, and this place, this internet café, was a way station.
All except for the one white man, two seats away from them.
Rebecca began with a cursory check of her email, Tom watching over her shoulder, trying to sniff out any sign of a boyfriend. It was a deluge of condolence messages, mainly from acquaintances as far as he could tell. She clicked her way through them, then called up NYTimes.com, finding the page which promised to open up the archive of The New York Times.
‘All right,’ Rebecca said, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.
‘Now remember,’ Tom whispered, conscious of the man close by. ‘He told us the date. April 13th 1946. So let's start with that.’
‘It wants keywords.’
‘Try “Nuremberg, poison”.’
She typed the words in slowly, with two fingers.
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