Алистер Маклин - Prime Target

‘Do you feel the way poor old Samuel Weiss must have felt, after they had taken away his vision and his means of expression?’

The young man pulled Jürgen to his feet and stood him in front of the easel again. He raised the gun.

‘In the end he must have longed for death.’

The young man fired the gun into Jürgen’s face.

Sabrina poured a large cognac and handed it to Erika as she came out of the bedroom. Erika drank it in two swallows. Sabrina poured another. This time Erika sipped.

‘He’s asleep,’ she said.

Gregor had gone to bed. The CS gas had made him sick. Erika had overcome his apparent desire to fight, and told him firmly that he needed rest. In the end he felt too ill to resist.

‘I didn’t realize how attached I had become,’ Erika said.

‘It can be a surprise.’

‘I thought, if he dies, I’m going to die too.’ She looked at Sabrina.

‘I need you to keep your promise, Erika.’

‘Go to the kitchen, we can spread things out in there.’

Sabrina prepared coffee while Erika made a telephone call. By the time the coffee was ready, a motorcycle courier was at the door with a satchel. Erika brought it to the kitchen and put the contents on the broad worktop. There was a thick book bound in black leather, a photograph album, and hand-written notes on hundreds of sheets of paper, stapled together in batches.

‘This material is kept at the home of a magistrate,’ Erika said. ‘This is the first time it has been out of that place since it was gathered together.’

Sabrina touched the hard leather cover of the big book.

‘That is a catalogue of crimes committed by the Jugend von Siegfried. It’s the accumulated records of more than two thousand acts of brutality, robbery, fraud, coercion and murder, committed over a thirty-five-year period.’

‘These are their own records?’

‘Copies, yes. Hard won, I promise you. It has cost time, money and labour, and at least one cooperative lawyer’s clerk was killed for helping us.’

‘What are the pictures?’

‘The guilty men and mementoes of some of their victims. The collection means very little, unless your own heart is caught up in what they did, and what they still do.’

‘And the bundles of notes?’

‘Interview material, mostly the testimony of victims.’

‘It looks like a labour of love. Or hate.’

‘What astonishes me, even now,’ Erika said, ‘is that the records exist. They are so damning. Nazis have this self-destructive compulsion to record everything they do. They can’t make a move without making a record of it. They have to leave their mark, like dogs at lamp-posts. During the war, they spent fortunes in time, money and manpower just keeping their records straight – the very records that hanged dozens of them.’

‘It looks like a well organized collection.’

‘It is brilliantly done. The method of accumulation and cataloguing was devised by Emily Selby’s father, Johannes Lustig.’

‘Your father’s cousin.’

‘Yes. To me he was Uncle Johannes. He also carried out the early research work. As time passed and we became more organized, the research was co-ordinated by myself and the other members of Juli Zwanzig. We only became a group with a name after Uncle Johannes died. It was his wish.’

‘I know.’

Erika sighed. ‘I suppose I should have guessed.’

‘Are you all activists? Or are you mainly fundraisers and co-ordinators?’

‘I am an activist against Nazis in general,’ Erika said. ‘Journalism is my chosen means of attack. The others raise money, as you surmised. They fund lectures and publications to keep alive the truth of what happened to whole generations of Jews, and they do what they individually can to give our movement shape and spirit. But at the core, Juli Zwanzig has physical aims–’

‘To kill off the surviving members of the Jugend von Siegfried.’

‘That is correct. Uncle Johannes insisted nothing less would do. We lacked the stomach, individually and collectively, for such a course of action, but that didn’t mean it was wrong. We needed to find a person who could consummate our aims.’

‘You had no moral problem with that? Hiring a killer?’

‘No problem at all,’ she said defiantly. ‘Just remember, we live with the knowledge that year in, year out, the Jugend von Siegfried systematically undermine, sabotage and actually kill Jews as a matter of policy. They do it subtly, without even communicating directly with each other. Unopposed, they would never stop. Somebody has to stop them, somebody has to punish their iniquity.’

‘They’re not bomb-proof. You have evidence here that the police can use against them.’

‘Uncle Johannes did not want them handed over to the law. To extract the kind of justice he called for, we needed someone who hated the Nazis as much as we do, and who was capable of killing.’

‘So who does that? Who’s the mysterious young man with fair hair and blue eyes?’

For a moment Erika looked as if she would not say. But the understanding between them was clear, and she had given her word. Sabrina watched her head bow a fraction, the only sign that this was capitulation.

‘He is Einar Ahlin. A Norwegian.’

‘Why him?’

‘Two years ago he came to Germany vaguely intending to do harm to the new Nazis. We diverted his attention to the old Nazis instead.’

‘Norwegians have no fond memories of the Third Reich.’

‘This Norwegian especially. Einar has a troubled history. Very troubled. He is an epileptic with personality problems who just happened to be born into a family touched by tragedy. His grandparents were tortured to death by the occupying Germans in Oslo during the war. Their daughter’s life, as a consequence, was shadowed until the day she died.’

‘Einar’s mother.’

Erika nodded. ‘She committed suicide in 1989. For nearly fifty years she kept her hatred of the Nazis burning and the fire passed into Einar at an early age. Many people would regard his obsession with punishing Nazis as pathological.’

‘But you found it convenient.’

‘Read the facts any way you wish,’ Erika said. ‘He believes in what he does. I believe in it too. I am happy to fund work which achieves an end we both passionately seek.’

‘These records could probably put the remaining Siegfried boys in jail for the rest of their lives,’ Sabrina said.

‘You think that now I should hand them over to the police?’

‘It would be the civilized thing to do.’

‘That brings us back to retribution,’ Erika said. ‘Is a desire for proper redress so uncivilized? Justice on the biblical scale is the only real kind. These bastards have spent their lives from childhood working against Jews. They have wreaked misery, calamity and death on people they did not know. They have to pay for that. The enlightened liberal answer, life imprisonment, does not meet the bill. They have to pay with their lives.’

Sabrina noticed that the passion was gone from Erika’s voice. She was spouting the words, but now there was no force of conviction behind them.

‘Where is Einar Ahlin?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ A spark of defiance still flared, demonstrating once more the passion of Erika’s commitment to her cause.

‘Come on, Erika.’

‘I promised to co-operate, I didn’t promise to deliver anyone’s head on a plate. Besides, it’s true, I don’t know where he lives. When we meet it’s on neutral ground. He works from an address list Emily put together, and picks his targets from the order they appear in the picture.’

‘What picture?’

Erika opened the album and pressed it flat at a ten-by-eight sepia-toned enlargement. It showed Adolf Hitler, standing on a rain-swept, bombed-out street, saluting a group of young boys.