Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

‘Exactly. Which means whoever your father was after was just one person, one name he had kept in his head. I think the only way we're ever going to settle this is by finding out that name.’

‘How the hell are we going to do that?’

Tom was all but forming his reply, that he had no idea, when it struck him. Of course: what an elementary mistake. Too bloody old.

Tom quickly folded the blueprints and postcards back inside the picture frame – reckoning that since they had escaped detection there so far, there was probably no safer hiding place – and crudely taped the thing back together. ‘We're going.’

‘Where? I don't understand.’

‘Neither do I. Not yet. But I think we're about to.’

He would have preferred to have gone somewhere else, somewhere with more people, but without the car they couldn't be choosy. So they would take their chances and simply make the ten-minute journey back to the internet café on Kingsland High Street. The second Tom walked out of the front door, he scanned the street. He saw two women pushing buggies, one on a mobile phone. It could be an ingenious cover – or nothing at all. He looked in the other direction. A postman – or was that a disguise for a lookout? Thudding over the speed bumps was a white van with two young men inside. Had it been parked until Tom emerged? Did it contain not plungers and pumps, as promised by the ‘DrainClearers’ sign painted on the side, but state-of-the-art surveillance equipment? Tom shook his head, aware that all he could do was keep looking over his shoulder, cross the road at the first sight of anyone suspicious and stick to busy streets.

It made him feel grateful that Gerald Merton had stayed in Hackney, even to the end. Well-to-do areas were almost always deserted, especially at this time of day. Kids ferried to and from school in the sealed capsule of a four-by-four; fathers returning from work in a sleek, insulated BMW; any chat with neighbours done indoors and by telephone or, for all he knew these days, computer. But in a poorer part of town, a place like Hackney, life was lived on the street. There were always people around, waiting for a bus or picking up a bottle of milk and a packet of fags from the shop. In the residential areas kids still played football in the middle of the road. They weren't told by their mothers to stay indoors, for fear of what other, rougher lads might do to them. They were the kids other kids were frightened of.

Tom appreciated it all, as they made the three or four turns towards the high street en route to the grandly titled Newington International Call Centre.

‘I've been thinking,’ Rebecca said, looking left and right as they crossed Cazenove Road. ‘Shouldn't we have heard from the police by now? About the autopsy.’

‘No news is good news. If they'd found anything, we'd know about it. If there were drugs or poison in Goldman's bloodstream, you, Dr Merton, would definitely know about it.’

‘So the police will say he died of natural causes?’

‘And therefore it's not a murder inquiry.’

‘But it should be.’

Tom thought about repeating his earlier reassurances – that Goldman's death might have been no more than a coincidence – but he couldn't do it.

They'd reached the internet café where he was gratified to see the same melancholy clientele gathered for the afternoon shift. The fake-wood phone booths were again filled to capacity; most of the computer terminals were in use. As Tom handed over a couple of pound coins, reserving the machine at the end of the row, an older, bearded man, in traditional ultra-orthodox Jewish garb, got up from the next seat along. Now there were two spaces, one for each of them.

He went straight to Google and typed in the two words which had struck him with such force in Gershon's flat. It had been such a basic error of logic he was almost embarrassed by it. What had been his request to New York? To come up with a list of everyone over seventy who was present for the week-long General Assembly. He had drawn a blank, presented with a roll-call that included a Chinese interpreter and an Israeli head of state, among others. The opposite of a list of Nazi war criminals.

But when Rebecca had complained that ‘Everyone's too bloody old,’ he had instantly seen it. Just as she had been raised in the shadow of the events of the Nazi era, so had many others of her generation. And not all of them were children of the victims. Some were the children of the perpetrators. They too might have been drawn into this strange, left-over riddle, still unfinished after all these years. They might have been enlisted into this posthumous battle just as Rebecca had been, fighting the wars of their fathers. Except these men, the ones Tom was imagining, would be fighting on the other side.

Which is why Tom so badly wanted his hunch to be wrong as he typed into the Google search field the two words that made his heart heavy.

Henning Munchau.

Most of the pieces that appeared were in German, starting with a news story from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung when Munchau's appointment at the UN was announced and several others from the specialist legal press. In English there was an interview with New World , the magazine of the United Nations Association in Britain, and a diary item from the New York Observer , noting Munchau's legal summons to the Manhattan magistrate for failure to pay a parking fine. Not what Tom was looking for.

He put his head in his hands. He knew there was something else he wasn't remembering. Think. Think.

Tom closed his eyes trying to visualize the office of the legal counsel, plush with an outer area containing two secretaries and a window view over the East River. There was a sign on Henning's door. He had gone past it a thousand times without ever looking at it properly. Slowly it formed, in his mind's eye, the lettering taking shape. There it was: W. Henning Munchau.

W.

Now it came back to him, both of them in the queue to leave Dili, East Timor waiting for their papers to be checked and approved. They had swapped documents, so that Henning could examine Tom's passport photo and mock him on his visible decline.

‘Once so handsome. What went wrong, eh, Tommy?’

Tom had seen nothing that provided counter-ammunition in Munchau's photograph: the man had barely seemed to age. But he had seen his colleague's full name for the first time.

‘Ah, we have a Kaiser in our midst, no less. Pray silence, Mein Herren, for Kaiser Wilhelm Henning Munchau.’

Henning had shut him up. Tom hadn't questioned that at the time. He was getting leery, there were people around. But now, replaying that memory in his head, Tom wondered if Henning had suddenly lost his smile for a different reason.

He retyped the name into the computer.

Once again, the first two entries were in German. They seemed to be from formal legal gazettes with Henning's name in among a long list of others: probably the announcement of various awards and promotions.

Tom decided to narrow it down. Not allowing himself to stop, lest he change his mind, he reentered the name into the search field – Wilhelm Henning Munchau - this time adding one more word: Nazi.

It took the machine less than a second to scour the world and find the sentence Tom had dreaded. But there it was, the first few words of an entry intelligible even in the opening list of results. It came from a website attached to the Department of History at the University of Maryland.

Captain Wilhelm Henning Munchau, 1898-1975; served in the SS's Totenkopfverbände or Death's Head units; received suspended sentence from West German court in 1966 for service at Theriesenstadt (Terezin).