Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

When they stepped out of the lift, Henry Goldman was waiting for them. He stretched his arms open to embrace Rebecca, but clumsily, as if handling a new-fangled device he had not yet mastered. He shook Tom's hand, then ushered them both into a conference room more plushly furnished than even the grandest meeting place in the United Nations.

‘Rebecca, I was so sorry to hear of your news. We all were.’

Rebecca nodded. ‘My father always said your father was his best friend.’

‘That's true. I think my father regarded Gerald as a kind of younger brother.’ A wounded expression briefly flitted across his face. ‘Maybe even another son.’

‘I presume he told you things. As his lawyer.’

At that, Goldman stretched out his legs and smoothed a hand over his tie. Tom recognized the colours of the Garrick Club.

‘You've come here from Julian's office, you say? You know the key,’ Goldman paused, ‘materials are kept there now.’

‘I know,’ said Rebecca. ‘I've just seen them.’

‘I see.’

The lawyer got to his feet and began to pace away from the table, towards the window. The light was fading; Canary Wharf was beginning to glitter in the twilight. ‘I cannot claim to be wholly surprised by this turn of events. No matter what we tell our clients, it's a simple truth that nothing can stay secret forever. Isn't that right, Mr Byrne?’

Tom was barely paying attention. He had not got past the clipped English accent, straight out of a Kenneth More movie. This was the son of a Holocaust survivor, underground fighter and forest partisan; this stuffed-shirt in a Garrick Club tie? He should have been used to it by now, having spent the last decade in the ultimate city of immigrants, but this seemed such an extreme case. Perhaps this is what people meant when they talked of becoming ‘more English than the English’.

Rebecca didn't give Tom time to answer. ‘Can you tell us what you know?’

Tom fought the urge to inhale sharply. What an elementary blunder: there would be no mistaking Rebecca Merton for a lawyer. Let the guy warm up.

‘I did know that one day this would come out. But, for some reason, I always suspected it would be Julian who would discover it and confront me over it.’

‘Can you tell me-’

Tom gritted his teeth, worried that she would scare Goldman off. But he needn't have worried: Henry Goldman simply talked over Rebecca.

‘Of course my father knew it all and he brought me into his confidence on some of the key aspects. I will not deny that it became a source of great tension between us, especially when I was a younger man first reading jurisprudence at Cambridge and, later, as an articled clerk and so on. I imagined Julian and I would re-run some of those arguments, with my son in the role of my father.’

Tom asked his first question. ‘And has Julian ever confronted you about this?’

‘No. It makes me wonder if perhaps he has not worked it out. But it's hardly Fermat's Last Theorem is it, Mr Byrne? Once that box is opened, it is a matter of adding two and two to reach a round and clear four.’

‘Perhaps Julian never opened the box.’ Tom didn't like taking over like this. But the Garrick tie had convinced him: a man like Henry Goldman would speak to a fellow white, male lawyer more openly than with a non-male, non-lawyer. For men of Goldman's ilk, that would be like communicating with another species. The fact that Rebecca was Jewish, while he, Tom, was not, did not seem to make any difference. The tie suggested Goldman was not that kind of Jew.

Goldman sat down at the table and gave them both a straight look in the eye. ‘It's difficult for me to talk about this without letting my own views show, and I am sure what you are both in need of is an uncoloured account. For which reason, perhaps it is best if I pass on – without too much commentary on my part – the arguments advanced by my father.’

‘Actually, a few facts at this stage would be an enormous help,’ Tom said, adopting the excessive politeness he affected whenever speaking with the English establishment.

‘Very well.’ Goldman leaned forward. ‘As you now know, Rebecca's father was involved in the-’ he searched for the right word, ‘- removal of certain men associated with the events of the Second World War.’

Tom could see Rebecca's leg oscillating up and down in a constant vibration.

‘Well, I have to tell you. He did not do this work alone. He was part of an organization. We would call them Holocaust survivors now, though no one used that word at the time. They were men, and a few women, who had seen unspeakable horrors. Unspeakable.’ Goldman gave a little shake of his head. ‘At the start, in the final weeks of the war and immediately afterwards, there were no more than fifty of them, with maybe two hundred more offering help on the outside. Almost all had been involved in the resistance in some way.’

An image floated into Tom's head of the young Gershon Matzkin, posing as Vitatis Olekas, hopping on and off trains as he criss-crossed occupied Europe, cheating death and desperately trying to warn others so that they might live. Aunt Esther has returned and is at Megilla Street 7, apartment 4.

'They were ghetto fighters, my father included. And I suppose this effort evolved quite naturally out of that. They had been trying to kill Nazis before and they were killing Nazis now. Churchill and Roosevelt had declared the war over, but “it wasn't their war to finish”. That's what my father used to say. Hitler had declared war on the Jews long before he declared war on Britain or America or Russia. The Jews had their own score to settle.

‘But there was more to it than that. More to what we-’ he meant Tom and him, fellow lawyers, ‘-would speak of as motive. To understand that, you have to start from first principles.’

Tom didn't even have to look over at Rebecca to know she was squirming in her seat. He felt it too. Goldman had no appreciation of the urgency of their situation. They hadn't told him about last night's break-in for fear it would make him clam up. He hadn't become the emeritus senior partner of Roderick Jones, with a corner office view of Docklands, by wading balls deep into trouble. They would have to be patient.

‘You have to remember that Jewish resistance to the Nazis was impossible.’ Goldman raised his palm in protest, anticipating an objection. 'I know, I know. There was resistance. My father and your father, Rebecca, were part of it. Nevertheless, the logical starting point is that Jewish resistance was impossible. You have to understand that to understand anything.

‘As you know, Nazi control was absolute. Even the slightest act of defiance would be punished by swift and lethal retaliation. Dare to raise a hand to a Nazi and they would kill you, your family and your whole community, without compunction. For one of them, they would kill a thousand of you. But that's not the main thing.’

Rebecca was now drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair.

'The Jews lacked the essential requirements of any plausible resistance. They had no arms, no tradition of fighting. They had no army, no barracks, no arsenals. The Poles and the French had been sovereign nations, with their own armies; there were resources – arms dumps and so forth, even in the middle of the countryside – they could call on when under occupation. The Jews had none of that.

‘Above all, they had no friends. No one would help them at all. I'm sure you know the stories, the lengths the Jews had to go to, the bribes they had to pay, to get the Poles or Lithuanians or Ukrainians to sell them so much as a single pistol. And if they ever got out, ever escaped the Nazis, woe betide them if they ran into the rest of the resistance. The Poles or Lithuanians or anyone else for that matter hated the Jews so much, they were only too glad to finish off anybody the Nazis had been foolish enough to let slip away. As my late father, who loved English idiom, used to say, “We went from the fire into the frying pan”.’