Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

Quietly, I holstered my gun, gathered up my things, including a bag which now contained a range of unused weapons, including a spare revolver – but certainly no syringes or petrol – and closed the door of room 212 softly behind me.

‘Rebecca, I'm afraid there's no other way to understand it. Don't you see the pattern?’

They were standing next to each other, their arms just touching, poring over the papers spread out on the table.

‘For every date stamp on a passport, there's a cutting. Look.’

Methodically, Tom set out the pile of newspaper clippings alongside the passports. There was one from Liberation in late 1952. He translated, falteringly, out loud: ‘Detectives in Les Halles are seeking witnesses who may be able to help them with information about the death on Tuesday evening of a man apparently hit by a speeding car and flung onto the railings of a Metro station. Police said the man's injuries suggested he had been hit at top speed…’ In neat handwriting, a hand Tom recognized, a short sentence had been pencilled in the margin: SS Captain Fritz Kramer, Birkenau.

And there it was: a stamp in Gerald Merton's British passport establishing that he had flown into Orly airport two days earlier and left the day after the reported accident.

Next, a news report of a corpse found hanging in a Rio suburb later that same year. Tom checked the date and, sure enough, ‘Fernando Matutes’ had arrived in Brazil four days before the hanging and had left the same day. The passport showed he had travelled direct from Brazil to Argentina, just in time, it seemed, for the mysterious road traffic accident which would strike two days later – the newspaper account of which had been carefully preserved in this same box.

An explosion in an apartment building in Lille, a botched operation in a Munich hospital: each time, Tom could find a passport stamp that coincided. There were reports of men killed in car accidents, some of them only months apart. One was found dead in a gutter. The pencilled note identified him as Hans Stuckart, Ministry of Interior. An account from 1953 reported police bafflement after a driver was burned alive, his car having suffered a rare steering failure which sent it spinning across the highway. The handwritten note added that the deceased was Otto Betz, deported Jews of France.

Now Rebecca was working through the cuttings herself, rapidly turning them over, one after another, in date order. After the first set from 1945 and 1946, they jumped to 1952, then paused again before the final item, which dated from the early 1960s in the Winnipeg Free Press. It reported the death of an Estonian immigrant, found hanged in his home. The police were looking for no one else. In pencil, the suicide was identified as Alexander Laak, commandant of the Jägala concentration camp in Estonia.

Silently, Tom tucked each news story into a passport, inserting it alongside the page where there was a matching stamp. By the end he had done that for nearly three quarters of the news reports; all that was left was the small pile of German items from 1945.

‘Rebecca, what languages did your father speak?’

‘Lots,’ she said quietly, staring down at the table. ‘German, Russian. French, I think. Maybe Spanish.’

A sentence from the notebook surfaced. My sisters and I went to the school and I discovered that I was good at learning languages. The teacher said I had an ear for it.

Tom didn't know what to say. First the shooting in New York and now this: the father Rebecca thought she knew had been killed twice over.

She fell into a chair, biting her lip so hard he thought it might bleed.

He dragged his gaze away. ‘Look, Rebecca, this is-’

‘Don't say anything.’

‘I don't know what else we-’

‘I need time to think.’

Tom retreated, clearing up the items from the table and putting them back.

At last, Rebecca stood, picked up her father's box and strode over to Julian. Tom watched her hand it back to him, and then ask for what appeared to be a favour. Julian scribbled down a number, kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye. Tom ran after her as she went out the door and onto the street, feeling like a dog on a lead.

‘Where are we going now?’

‘To see the one man who might know the truth about my father.’

The convenience stores and fast food restaurants rapidly gave way to the sparkle of steel and glass. As they passed by the Gherkin, another London landmark that had sprouted in Tom's absence, Hackney receded and the glistening towers of Canary Wharf became visible.

‘You drive,’ Rebecca had said as they walked away from the Kingsland Law Centre. ‘I want to think.’ And she had sat there in the passenger seat, her face grim with determination.

In a court of law, Tom could have just about constructed an argument that all the evidence they had uncovered was circumstantial, that there was no ironclad proof connecting Gershon Matzkin to any one of the killings, let alone all of them. Most had been recorded as suicides or road traffic accidents; there was nothing that could establish beyond doubt that foul play had occurred. And even if it had, young Gershon might have served as only a minor accomplice, perhaps a lookout. There was no proof that he was a killer.

And yet, neither he nor Rebecca doubted that Gershon Matzkin had been an assassin. Who else would keep a score-sheet, a roll call of war criminals, their names crossed out on the occasion of their deaths, but the man responsible? This, surely, was the record of his labours, maintained with pride. (It was something Tom's friends in the criminal lawyer fraternity had told him often undid felons: sheer professional pride, the desire to be credited for one's work. One way or another, consciously or otherwise, they had wanted their endeavours to be recognized. It was a basic human impulse.)

As they drove on, Tom began to see everything slip into place. Of course Gershon had always eschewed publicity, refusing to address seminars or be interviewed for oral history archives: he could not dare risk his story slipping into public view. No wonder those last few pages of the notebook had been torn out. Carried away by the equally human desire to shape the narrative of one's own life, he must have begun to set down his story in full – only to realize that what he had written amounted to a confession of serial murder. Tom could picture him realizing his error, frantically tearing out the incriminating sheets of paper, shredding or burning them, until their remarkable reminiscences were once more consigned to oblivion.

He thought back to the corpse he had seen little more than twenty-four hours ago in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, how he had been struck by the toned muscle, the body of a strong man who had fought to keep his shape. Now that strength made sense. He had been a human weapon, deployed to hit back at those who had nearly wiped out his entire people. He had chosen to do what the Jews had barely been able to do when it counted: to fight back. Of course he had to be strong. He needed to be a Samson, with enough muscle in his arms to smite every last one of the Jews' murderous enemies. This man had been their avenging angel.

Tom's phone rang. ‘It's in my pocket,’ he said, his eyes on the road. ‘Take it out, but don't answer it. Just tell me who it is.’

Rebecca reached across, trying to find the opening in his jacket, her fingers brushing against him. There were layers of clothes between them, but still the sensation sent a charge through him. He gripped the steering wheel tight.

‘Unknown caller,’ she said.

He took the phone from her and pressed the green button. ‘Tom Byrne.’