Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

Quickly now, sure that he was right, Tom flicked through the pages of the Spanish passport and saw that the first and last time it had been used was in August 1952. Quickly, he pored over the pile of newspaper cuttings until he found one in Spanish. And there it was. Faded and yellowing but nevertheless clear: El Correo , the newspaper of the Basque country, from the second week of August, 1952.

El Correo August 12 1952

Tourist found dead in San Sebastián hotel; wife discovers body

Police in San Sebastián have launched an inquiry into the mysterious death of a holidaymaker, whose body was discovered by his wife in their room in the Hotel Londres. Mrs Schroeder said she and her German-born husband had been enjoying a week's vacation and that he had shown no signs of distress or depression. ‘I had only been out shopping for an hour or so, and when I came back he was, he was-’ a grief-stricken Mrs Schroeder told a reporter, before breaking down in tears.

I found the abundance of food the biggest shock. I had never seen such plenty, treats spilling out of every opening. Fresh fish laid on a bed of ice, their heads still intact; the counter brimming over with delights, from rolled peppers to the congealed potato omelette which somehow, even cold, managed to be delicious; the slices of salami and cheese, all ready to be munched down with a wipe of a paper napkin promptly dropped to the floor – and, of course, the rows of cured hams above the bar.

I confess, I had to stop myself staring at those suspended hams. I had never seen anything like it. Not in the ghetto of course, where there had been no meat, let alone a pig. And not in London where I had made my home, where food was still a precious rationed commodity. If this was what it was like to lose the war, why had we all fought so hard to win?

I sat on my own. I was used to that by now. I was barely twenty-two years old, but I had travelled all around Europe – France, West Germany, Austria – and beyond, to South America and Canada, always on my own. I had learned how to sit in a restaurant and read without drawing attention to myself. The trick was not to hide. No trilby hats or newspapers in front of the face, like in the movies. Show yourself, act confident, act like a local or else, unembarrassed, like a tourist. That way no one would notice you.

A shelf suspended above the bar was packed with every conceivable variety of liquor: five different types of whisky, more vodkas than I could count and a line of brandies. Had it been like this here during the war? Had the wine flowed and the tables groaned while Rosa and I had lived like wild animals, scratching for our very lives? An image of my sisters floated into my mind. That happened a lot when I was on a mission.

I needed to stay clear-headed, to keep my focus on the task in hand. I had been given that advice by one of the leaders, before he himself was killed on duty. ‘Don't hate them,’ he had said. ‘Hate them before and hate them afterwards. But don't hate them when you do a job. If you do, you will fail – and they will win.’

Usually, I managed to follow that advice. When I had crept into the hospital in Bochum in the far west of Germany, dressed in a doctor's white coat, and told my ‘patient’, a former Gestapo commander, now tucked up in bed with a thermometer under his tongue, that everything was on track for the minor operation in the morning, but that first he would need to do a brief test – one which entailed injecting kerosene into his bloodstream, as it happened – I had felt only a cool sense of purpose.

When I stamped on the accelerator in Paris, having pursued SS Captain Fritz Kramer down a side street, I did not feel hot anger course through my veins. Not even as I watched the mass murderer run for his life. No, I was calm as I caught up with the former officer of the Birkenau camp, the front of my car ramming him at speed, sending him flying fifteen feet until he landed spread-eagled, like a scarecrow, on the station railings.

I kept a memento of each operation, a report from the local newspaper recording the ‘death in mysterious circumstances’ or the ‘tragic accident’ which had deprived the community of one more Nazi war criminal posing as an upright citizen. It gives me no pleasure to record the fact that I had become one of the group's most accomplished executioners, able to slip in and out of most countries without impediment. Of course it helped, as it always had, that my hair was blond and my eyes blue. Occasionally my prey would look at me with warmth, imagining they were about to have a reunion with a young comrade. Sure, they couldn't quite place the face, but I looked the right sort. Where did we know each other from? Was it Sachsenhausen, or perhaps the Ukraine? Did we serve together, Mein Herr? Not quite, no.

So I was not usually fazed by my work. But this job was different. My target now was Joschka Dorfman, who had served the Reich with distinction as one of the senior men at the death camp of Treblinka, about a hundred kilometres northeast of Warsaw. For my comrades, that was the chief item on the indictment: some 840,000 people, almost all Jews, had perished at Treblinka, ‘processed’ through its gas chambers at a rate of ten thousand per day, an efficiency that was the envy of the other death camps. From the entire time in which Treblinka was in operation little more than a hundred people survived.

But that was not the cause of the small bubbling of sweat I could feel on my back, threatening to stain my shirt. The source of that could be found in another line on Joschka Dorfman's curriculum vitae. Because the lieutenant had won his promotion not in Poland but in next door Lithuania, in the city of Kaunas to be precise. At the Ninth Fort, where he had been one of those charged with filling the pits with the corpses of fifty thousand people, most of them Jews. I knew that, among those Dorfman would have seen shot in the back – if, that is, he had not fired the bullets himself – would have been my Hannah, my Rivvy and my Leah.

He would be here soon, I didn't doubt it. So far all the information we had received from our man in Spain had proved entirely reliable. Dorfman and his wife were indeed in town on vacation, as promised. Their home was in Alicante, in the Spanish south-east. Hundreds of them had gone there: it had become a haven for former servants of the Führer. Dorfman's movements were known; it would have been perfectly possible to hunt him down there. Possible, but risky. An operation in the heart of a retirement village of ex-Nazis would alert the others; they might flee or, worse, attempt to come after us. Better to take care of it here, at the opposite end of the country, where word would not spread.

Our source had discovered that the Dorfmans, husband and wife, liked to vacation here in the Basque country. They had developed a particular fondness for San Sebastián and I could see why. The whole town curved around the bay; its beaches were wide and fine. I had seen the couple swim in the morning, letting their skin dry in the sun. Then they would come here for a late lunch; she would drink wine, he preferred beer. Sated, he would return to the Hotel Londres for a siesta while she went strolling through the cobbled streets, idly window shopping. It looked like a pleasant routine and they had followed it on each one of the three days since they had got here.

I checked my watch the instant they arrived: ten to two. They looked tanned and handsome, the glow of a good holiday. She was smiling as she came in, removing a large, floppy sunhat and shaking the last grains of sand from her hair. He was wearing sunglasses, which gave me a surge of anxiety. What if he did not take them off? It would be impossible to make a one hundred per cent positive identification without seeing his eyes. But then they reached the counter and, keen to peruse the pintxos on offer, he removed his glasses and I was certain.