Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

He stepped towards Rebecca, aiming to place a gentle hand on her arm and guide her out of the chapel. He hoped she would not make a scene. But the instant he moved, she wheeled around and gave him a look that froze him.

‘Don't disappoint me, Tom.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Don't think so little of me. Or my father.’

‘I don't under-’

‘Do you really think he would have come here, ready the way he was ready, if he wasn't certain? Dead certain, that this man is exactly who he thought he was? Do you think I would be here now if I wasn't certain?’

‘But it's just one photograph.’

‘Oh no, Tom. There are many more photographs of this man. He was one of the stars of the ghetto, weren't you, Mr Secretary-General?’

Tom looked at the SG – who had the same pitying expression fixed on his face – then back at Rebecca. ‘There are more photos?’

‘Yes, there are more. They weren't all taken by Kadish either. Lots were taken by the Nazis themselves. Half a dozen at least, some quite formal, some casual, the boys joshing around. Like a team photo. And young Paavo Viren, or whatever his name was then, always in the middle: the team mascot.’

‘But he's just sixty-eight.’

‘He lied about his age. Plenty of the young ones did. They got new papers, adding ten years to their date of birth. Once they were in their late twenties, it all sounded plausible enough. It was easy. Remember, they had a whole lot of people to help them.’

‘He's from Finland.’

‘He went to Finland, Tom. Not the same thing. Some went to Canada, some to Ohio,’ she glanced back at the SG, ‘some even went to Germany, for Christ's sake. They started over: new lives, new names. Finland was a good choice: hardly any Jews there, and certainly no survivors of Kovno. No one who would remember.’

Tom looked at her, imagining how she appeared in Viren's eyes: a crazed, deluded young woman. ‘Where is all this evidence, Rebecca?’ Tom hated how his voice sounded, sceptical, prosecutorial – as if he were doing the SG's work for him.

‘It was all there, in London, in a file. But it was taken. One of the first things they took.’

‘From your father's flat or from yours?’

Her delay in answering suggested she understood the significance of the question. ‘From mine.’

‘So you've known this all along.’

‘My father told me what he was doing before he went to New York.’

Tom nodded, a gesture that was not meant to convey acceptance so much as a pause, a timeout in which he could digest what she was telling him. ‘And what else did you know, Rebecca?’

‘I knew about DIN. But not the rest, I swear. The break-in made no sense to me. The bakery, Tochnit Aleph – I never knew anything about that. You have to believe me.’

‘It makes no sense, Rebecca. Why would your father tell you about DIN and keep the rest secret?’

‘I've tried to work that out, Tom, really I have. All I can think of is that my father was ashamed. Plan A was random. It was indiscriminate. The DIN I knew of only went after the guilty. But if I knew about Plan B I'd find out about Plan A. And if I knew that, then I think my father believed I'd stop loving him.’

Viren cleared his throat, as if he were politely requesting his moment at the podium. ‘You say this so-called “evidence” has vanished? It has been stolen?’

Rebecca did not answer. Tom said nothing.

‘So we are back where we started, correct? Back with a wild claim?’

Tom was struck again by the simple fact that Viren was still here. Rebecca did not have him at gunpoint; she had no physical leverage over him at all. Yet here he still was. Why?

Rebecca now walked back a couple of paces, coming closer to Tom. Once there, she faced the SG and raised her voice a notch. ‘I'll leave you alone. I'll drop these claims. I'll never make them again.’

‘Dr Merton, I'm glad to hear-’

‘On one condition.’

‘What? What condition?’

‘That you let me examine your left arm.’

The features of Viren's face remade themselves, from initial confusion to horrified indignation. He looked aghast. ‘How dare you suggest such a thing. Do you have any idea who you are addressing? I am the elected representative of the entire world community!’

But still he didn't leave. What was he frightened of? Did he fear that if he stormed out, Rebecca would rush into the lobby of the UN and start shouting that the SG was a Nazi war criminal? She would be bundled out by Security and that would be the end of it. Why did he care what she said?

Was he waiting for something that would change her mind? And then a new thought struck. The SG was waiting for him , for Tom. If he, her escort on this trip to New York, agreed that Rebecca was just a traumatized, grieving daughter, then her claims would be discarded. But if he, a former senior lawyer at the UN, lent her any credence then the charges would gain at least some currency. And mud like this needed to be hurled only once to stick. Tom wondered if the new Secretary General was one of the few people in this building who did not know Tom Byrne's history: otherwise, he surely would have known what the Israeli president had known – that any claim Tom Byrne made about anything could be dismissed with a wave of the hand. Mafia hack.

Now Tom understood. He had been forced into the role of referee; the SG wanted Tom to agree with him that Rebecca Merton was a maniac. Only then would he risk stepping back into the outside world, letting this woman rant and rave with her accusations.

‘I think you should let her see your arm,’ Tom said softly. ‘Then this thing can be over.’ And he stepped forward and took hold of Viren's left wrist. The Secretary-General desperately tried to remove his arm from Tom's grasp. But he did not shout or scream.

‘OK, Rebecca,’ Tom said, suddenly aware that he was assaulting an innocent, eminent old man – an old man with a shocking degree of strength. ‘Take a look at his arm.’

She stepped closer, her own nervousness clear. She couldn't look Viren in the eye, focusing instead on his wrist. Slowly, with great care, she pushed up the sleeve of his jacket, then began to unbutton the cuff of his shirt. She was cautious, like someone handling a suspicious package.

‘What are you looking for?’ Tom said, the words squeezed out between short breaths as he struggled to keep the older man restrained.

‘I'm looking for a scar,’ Rebecca said, her voice low and steady, a doctor in surgery. And then she looked up, so that she might fix the writhing Viren in her gaze. ‘I'm looking for the scar my father's sister left on the arm of a young man who raped her, a young man who terrorized the children of the Kovno ghetto – a young man they called the Wolf.’

Tom wasn't sure he felt Paavo Viren's muscles go rigid at the mention of that word. It could have been another trick of the mind, Tom imagining what was not there. But now Rebecca had the old man's sleeve rolled up to his elbow and she was staring hard.

Wolf. It had taken Tom a beat, no more, to remember that name. It had been one of the most chilling details in the Kovno journal of Gershon Matzkin. Indeed, it had been one of the few occasions when the Nazi enemy had a face.

As Tom felt the strain in his arms from keeping Viren immobilized, he tried to see again those handwritten lines. The Wolf had not been German; Gershon had been describing the son of one of the Lithuanian guards in the ghetto. The Jewish inmates had feared him especially – or perhaps that was, as Rebecca had suggested just now, merely the memory of those who had been children at the time. It was easy to see why the young would fear him so intensely, a killer and tormentor with the face of a boy.