Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘But when he had his own place, he hung it on the wall. That's interesting, isn't it?’

‘Maybe he felt he owed her something, I don't know.’ Rebecca moved closer to the painting. ‘As a child I always resented the idea of Rosa: you know, “the woman who came before mummy” and all that. But you look at this and realize what an awful life she had. When she died, she was younger than I am now.’

‘What's it called? The painting.’

‘It's called Aleph. See the grey lines, they just about make the shape of an Aleph. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.’

‘Right.’

The two of them stood there, gazing at it, the shape of the letter now obvious. Tom was trying to imagine the world these two young-old people, a boy and a girl, inhabited those sixty years ago. A world of massacres and constant death and cruelty which, they believed, could only be redeemed by more death. He imagined Gershon in the bakery, doubtless praying that the tainted bread would touch the lips of the man who had murdered his beloved sisters.

And then it struck him, an idea thudding into his brain with such force he could barely grasp it.

He turned to Rebecca, grabbing her arm. ‘What was it you said before, when we were arguing about coming here? On the bus.’

‘I said that we had to come, we might have overlooked something-’

‘Not that, something else, keep going.’

‘I said, we didn't have any other option-’

‘That's it!’

‘-we had no plan B.’

‘Exactly! That's it: Plan B. What happened at the bakery wasn't the main operation after all. It was Plan B. That's what Sid called it.’

‘I thought B was for bakery.’

‘So did I. Brot , German for bread; or Bäckerei for bakery. Remember, that's what I said to Sid. “B for bakery”. And he said “No. Wrong again”. I thought that was the dementia, but when he was talking about the bakery operation he was perfectly lucid. He even remembered the exact date! Don't you see, he was telling the truth. Of course he was. Think about it, why would all these Jews from Poland and Lithuania use German for an operation's codename? They wouldn't. They would use Hebrew, just like they did with the name of their organization. Goldman told us, DIN was Hebrew for judgment. What's the Hebrew for bread?’

‘Lechem.’

‘Right. No “b” there. And what's the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet?’

‘Bet.’

‘You see! Plan Bet. Plan B. And it was called Plan B because it was plan b. It was the fallback plan.’

‘So what was the main plan?’

Tom smiled. ‘Plan A.’

‘Oh, well done, Sherlock.’

‘Or rather, as I think DIN might have called it, Plan Aleph.’

Slowly, they both turned to contemplate Rosa's assemblage of baleful blacks and night-time greys.

They took the painting down as carefully as their impatience would allow. One holding each end, they carried it into the centre of the room, where they leaned it in a forty-five degree angle against a chair.

They had already examined the picture microscopically, looking at it from an inch away, studying the thick accretions of oil paint, searching for clues – but they had found nothing.

Rebecca had returned from the kitchen with a steak knife and set about scraping the paint away from random sections of the canvas. Tom tried to divine whether the fierce energy she brought to the task was the urgent desire to see what the picture might conceal – or simply a long-repressed fury at the painting and indeed the artist who had created it. For all her efforts, they had found nothing, just the smudged blankness of the canvas underneath.

Now they were looking at the back. It had been expensively framed, with a thick wooden border, the canvas secured at the rear by copious amounts of binding tape. Tom took the knife from Rebecca and slowly sliced around the edge. He half-expected the picture to pop out, but it had been in too long for that. He began removing the tape, layers of it, soon realizing that the back was not the back of the canvas after all, merely a mounting that bulged out by a good quarter of an inch. He would have to remove this too.

He fought the urge simply to slice through the layers of cardboard backing, operating more gingerly instead. Eventually the surrounding tape was gone and he could see the edge of the card. Slowly, he lifted it off.

The second he had, they could both see his work had not been in vain. Stuck to the back of the painting, not glued but pressed there by time, was a set of papers. His hands trembling, Tom reached in and peeled them loose.

There were five sheets inside, all roughly the same size, about A3. When Tom turned the first one over, he almost pulled back in surprise. It was not what he was expecting – a photograph or a list of names that would at last unlock this mystery – but a drawing, something between a map and an architect's blueprint. The next was not identical but similar and so was the next and the next.

‘What the hell are these?’ he said, but Rebecca was too stunned to answer. Of all the revelations about her father, this one seemed to have blind-sided her most.

Tom stared hard at the first drawing. He wondered if it was an old-fashioned electrical diagram, a sketch for a circuit board perhaps. Then he wondered if it was, perhaps, a map of an underground railway; it certainly seemed to depict pathways and routes.

He looked more closely, his eye now just a matter of inches from the paper, close enough to smell the must. In a tiny hand, he could see numbers written at various intervals. They were, he decided, measurements.

And then Rebecca spoke. ‘Of course,’ she said quietly.

‘What is it?’ Tom said, his voice rising. ‘What?’

‘Do you remember from the notebook, how Rosa and the others escaped? From the ghetto?’

Tom shook his head. That would have been in the section he had skimmed, the pages dealing with the final stages of the war, the flight into the forests awaiting the arrival of the Red Army. The first mention of Rosa Tom could remember was when she and Gershon became lovers, which would have been long after she had broken free of the ghetto.

'Sewers. Rosa and the others, the leaders of the resistance – they all got out on the last day of the liquidation of the ghetto. The Jews were being rounded up and sent to the camps. But the resistance always had a plan for the last day, when there could be no more fighting back.

'So Rosa and the rest, they went down into the ground. Not my father. He was already on the road by then, spreading the word. But later Rosa told him what had happened. And he told me.

'The stench down there was just terrible. It had been raining that day and apparently that made it worse. And the pipes were so narrow, not much wider than their bodies, that they had to crawl through all that shit and piss on their hands and knees. And then, in some places, the pipes got even smaller, so they had to slither along on their stomachs – tilting their heads back just to gasp at the few inches of air. The liquid was giving off all kinds of gas; people were fainting. Not Rosa, though. She just pressed on. That's what she said anyway.

‘They did that for nearly two miles, until they got to an opening outside the ghetto walls where two fighters from the Communist underground were waiting to pull them out.’

‘And so-’

‘It took a lot of work. There was one senior member of the resistance who had been working on it for months, mapping every inch, every tunnel, every manhole cover. The sewers weren't just an escape route; the resistance used them for smuggling too, bringing in weapons. Plenty of people died down there: some were overwhelmed by the stench; others simply got lost.’