Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘I'm not thinking about that right now,’ Rebecca said, as if Gerald Merton's status as an innocent victim was beyond doubt. ‘But there are some things I need to find out. About my father.’

‘Well, you know everything, Rebecca. You were everything to him, anyone could see that.’ He turned to Tom. ‘You have never seen a father and daughter who were closer. Even when it was just the two of them, they were a family. A two-person family.’

‘What about the will?’

For the first time, Julian turned upon Rebecca an expression that was not undiluted adoration. He seemed shocked, the little boy who's just seen Snow White having a fag. ‘You can't be thinking of that now, surely.’

‘I want to know if there's anything he left for me.’

‘Oh, Rebecca.’

‘I don't mean money, Julian,’ she said with an impatience that pleased Tom. ‘I mean anything else he might have left here for safekeeping. To be given to me in the event of his death.’

Julian recovered himself. ‘You know he arranged his affairs when my father was still his lawyer, before Dad retired. I didn't actually do any of that with him myself.’

‘Can you check?’

Julian looked over at Lequasia, was about to ask her, shook his head and got up. ‘I won't be a minute.’

Tom looked over at Rebecca and raised his eyebrows, a gesture which in UN Plaza would have said everything but which here, he appreciated, needed explaining. ‘What's the story?’

‘My father was sentimental. He and Julian's grandfather came to this country together. I think he was also a partisan, though much older. When his son became a lawyer, my father became his first client. Out of loyalty. Then when the son retired, Dad moved onto the grandson.’

‘Did your father need a lawyer for any reason?’

The steel returned to Rebecca's eyes. ‘Not once.’

Tom got up, stretching his legs. The three Somali men were still waiting, their faces blank with weariness and disappointment. Quite a contrast, Tom thought, with the corporate suits and Mafia property developers who formed his own client base these days.

Julian emerged at last from a back store-room carrying a container structured like a shoe-box, though double the width, made of strong cardboard with metal reinforcements on the corners. The colour, once red, had faded to a pale pink; it was veneered in dust.

‘This is it, I'm afraid. Not exactly a house in Barbados, I know.’ He laid it on the desk.

‘How long has this been here?’ she asked, not touching it.

‘We had it transferred over here about two years ago, when my father retired. He started his law practice in 1967. So he could have got it from your father any time between those dates. It looks pretty old, doesn't it?’

Slowly, Rebecca removed the lid. Julian removed himself to the reception area, where he could be heard enunciating an apology to the three Somali men.

The moment the lid was off, Tom felt a surge of disappointment. He did not know what he had been expecting, but it was not this. The box seemed no different from the kind you might find in the homes of most pensioners: a collection of once-important documents, expired passports and the like. What had he hoped to find in there, a gun?

Carefully, Rebecca took each item out, as if handling precious stones. The old passports were bundled together with a rubber band. Next to them she placed a document which elicited a wistful smile. It was titled Certificate of Naturalization, the sheet of paper issued by the Home Office in 1947 which accepted Gershon Matzkin as a loyal subject of King George VI and magicked him into a new creature: Gerald Merton.

There were more certificates, including the incorporation of his dry cleaning business in Stoke Newington and one for the purchase of premium bonds. The long-gone world of post-war Britain seemed to rise from this box like a cloud of dust.

‘Tom, look at this.’

Crumpled at the bottom was a thin pile of newspaper cuttings. Rebecca lifted them out especially gently, to prevent them disintegrating in her hands. Some were yellow, others an anaemic shade of beige. Only a couple were in English. Several were in Spanish, two in Portuguese and half a dozen in German. Handwritten at the top of each was a simple date. They seemed to be collected in chronological order, the first few, almost all in German, clustered in the same period, the second half of 1945, the rest spread through the 1950s and 1960s.

‘Do you speak German?’ Tom asked.

Rebecca shook her head: ‘That was one language I never wanted to learn.’

She turned the first fragile clippings over, until she came across one from The Times. It was hard to tell which of the four or five news items on the page they were meant to look at, until Rebecca noticed a fine, faded pencil line boxing a story just a paragraph long.

Odilo Globocnik, former SS leader, was found dead yesterday in an alpine hut, high in the mountains near Weissensee. Occupying authority sources said Globocnik, notorious for overseeing the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, had most likely taken his own life…

There were two more in German, one from Die Welt , originally published by the British occupying forces after the German surrender. It too was a single-paragraph item, in the news-in-brief column, marked out in a square of black ink. Tom's schoolboy skills were just about adequate to translate.

The military spokesman yesterday announced that another high ranking official of the Third Reich had been found dead. SS Lieutenant Kurt Mussfeld had been a senior officer at both the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps…

Tom now reached over Rebecca for the envelope that had come through her letter box an hour earlier, his hand briefly brushing against hers and an electric charge coursing through him.

Forcing himself to concentrate, he laid out the hand-delivered list of names, then looked through the cuttings at the top of the pile, the 1945 ones, pulling out of the German news accounts the names of the men reported dead. He saw a Wilhelm Albert and a Karl Puetz. He glanced back at the list: there they both were, a cross by each of their names. He went deeper into the pile, finding names from the 1950s. They were on the list too, also crossed out.

An image of Gershon Matzkin floated into his head: prematurely old, hunched over his ledger, recording the deaths of ageing Nazis the world over. He imagined him scouring the newspapers, visiting the local library, crossing them off his list one by one, each death a balm to the terrible sorrow that must have devoured him. The deep tragedy of it – a man consumed by such grief and hatred, living only to hear of the faraway deaths of others – struck Tom. How powerless Gershon Matzkin must have felt, a boy whose family had been destroyed by these men, now grown up and watching from his dry cleaning shop, waiting for the day when a road accident here or a faulty electrical cable there might leave one less Nazi in the world. Is that why he had stayed fit, so that he might outlive them all, so that he might see the day when there were none of them left?

Or was that not how it was at all?

‘Rebecca, pass me the passports.’

Tom peeled off the rubber band – and he saw it straightaway. There were three old black, hardcover British passports, each in the name of Gerald Merton. But there was also a large, stiff, navy blue passport of the French Republic, issued in the name of Jean-Luc Renard – with a photo that was unmistakably the young Gerald. There was a travel document for Hans Borchardt, loyal citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany. It too came attached to a photograph of Gerald Merton. Tom looked at the dates inside: most were issued in 1952, though there were also passports for Paraguay and Argentina valid for a full decade later. Tom stared at one passport in particular. Issued in 1952, it identified one Fernando Matutes as a Spanish citizen – even though the picture inside showed the same, unsmiling face of Gerald Merton.