Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

  It was a posed shot of Kalb, probably taken in a studio, but there was no way to tell for sure. He was about the same age as in the previous picture – twenty, twenty-one – but the definition had become fuzzy over time, and the background was just a wall of black. He was looking at the camera, the view of his face the clearest it had been in any shot I’d seen of him so far: hair parted in the middle and slicked down either side, not even a hint of a smile. Still no scar. He was clean-cut and handsome, despite his sobriety.

  Then I noticed something.

  On the right were a couple of small white blobs, running diagonally against the indistinguishable darkness of his clothes. I selected the area and zoomed in. Two squares.

  Silver collar pips.

  He’s wearing a uniform.

  The memory flared again, but this time more clearly: something Robert Reardon had said to me before we’d got cut off. Her dissertation didn’t become about the years after Yalta, it became about the years before it. Carrie had done a hell of a lot of reading: Soviet history, Polish history, the major beats of the Second World War … I zoomed back out and looked at Kalb again. And as I did, a dreadful realization broke like a wave.

  I clicked through to the next picture.

  ‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘No, not this.’

  Another old black-and-white photo, but this time not of Kalb. It was the place I’d first thought to be a meadow, except there was no grass on it now. Just the railway lines.

  Because it wasn’t a meadow.

  It had never been a meadow.

  A train was at the platform, and in the background I could see the silhouette of a guard tower rising up out of the earth, looking across the tracks. Out of the train spilled hundreds of men, women and children. Uniformed officers were waiting for them as they came off, a few gesturing away from the platform, to some unspecified point off camera. I thought of the picture I’d seen moments before of the pine forest; of the empty space where nothing grew. That’s where they were being sent. It had never been a barn there.

  It had been a gas chamber.

  In the middle of the shot, watching everything, was Kalb.

  She already knew about So … Reardon hadn’t had a chance to finish what he was saying before we got cut off. But he didn’t need to now. She already knew about Sobibór.

  The Nazi extermination camp.

  57

  I put my phone back together, sliding the battery in and powering it on. I didn’t care any more. I just dialled the number and waited. Reardon answered after a couple of rings.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s David Raker.’

  ‘Mr Raker. We got cut off earlier.’

  ‘Daniel Kalb worked at Sobibór.’

  A pause. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Her dissertation was going to be about Polish history post-Yalta,’ I said to him, letting it unfold, needing to hear it myself to get it straight in my head. ‘But then she saw that picture of Kalb, in the States in the early seventies, and she changed her mind. Like you said to me, she’d already done a ton of reading on Polish history, so she knew about the camps – Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, all of them – and she knew about the men who had run them. She knew that Kalb had gone into hiding at the end of the Second World War. That changed everything. She turned her MA on its head and she went after him.’

  ‘Yes,’ Reardon said. ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  Reardon had probably seen the headlines early on – one of his students finding a man who’d helped send two hundred and fifty thousand Jews to the gas chamber. The hunt for the last Nazi.

  Then something Healy had said to me surfaced in my mind: the old man on the beach, the man I now knew to be Kalb, had had scarring under his left arm. It’s a small surface area. Like, really small. Only about a centimetre squared. But whether he did it himself, or someone else did it to him, the knife went in deep. Like he was cutting something out. I didn’t need the full forensic report. I knew why the scarring was there.

  ‘Was Kalb in the Waffen-SS?’

  ‘Yes,’ Reardon said. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Because he had the SS blood-group tattoo.’

  Some members of the Waffen-SS – especially early in the war – had their blood group tattooed on to a space near their left armpit. It allowed doctors to quickly identify their blood type in case a transfusion was needed and their dogtags were missing. But Kalb realized, after the war, that it was like having a target painted on him.

  So he cut it out.

  ‘How the hell did he end up at Sobibór?’ I asked.

  ‘We only have third-person accounts of a lot of this, but it looks like he started out as a guard at Dachau, then he was ferried out to the Eastern Front as part of Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of the Soviet Union. That’s where he got his facial injury. After that, he was sent back to Germany to recover, then – for whatever reason – landed at the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre in Austria, working for a man called Franz Stangl.’

  Stangl. In 1942, he became commandant of Sobibór. A year later, he was running Treblinka. While Kalb was in the States in the early 1970s, swanning about a free man, Stangl was being put on trial for the murder of nine hundred thousand people. He’d been on the run until his arrest in 1967. I’d done stories on Simon Wiesenthal, the Austrian Nazi hunter; even interviewed him. He’d been the one who’d found Stangl holed up in Brazil.

  ‘So Stangl chose Kalb as his deputy at Sobibór?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How old was Kalb at the time?’

  ‘On 16 May 1942, when Sobibór became fully operational, he would have been twenty-four. He was young, but very highly rated from what we can tell. Stangl chose him personally.’

  That made Kalb ninety-four at the time of his death. He’d had a long life he hadn’t deserved, but he’d gone out in a box, being sailed out to sea somewhere by Prouse. Yet, still, one thing remained unanswered: what connected him to Cornell?

  ‘And after Stangl left for Treblinka?’ I asked.

  ‘Kalb ran Sobibór – until the uprising.’

  The uprising.

  I’d read about it, but I let him fill in the blanks.

  ‘On 14 October 1943, about three hundred prisoners managed to escape the camp. Most of them died – they were either shot, or killed by mines – but about fifty to seventy made it to the end of the war alive. Himmler wasn’t impressed, as you might imagine, so he ordered all remaining prisoners to be killed, and then tore it down. The whole camp.’

  ‘So what happened to Kalb?’

  ‘Afterwards, a lot of the officers there, and at Treblinka, were put on anti-partisan duty in Trieste in Italy. It was basically a death sentence. Highly dangerous work. There had been an uprising at Treblinka too, a couple of months before Sobibór, so it was a kind of punishment for the soldiers; the price they paid for letting prisoners escape the camp. It was also an insurance policy for the Nazi hierarchy: if men like Kalb and Stangl didn’t make it, they couldn’t report back on what had gone on in any of the death camps.’

  ‘And after the war?’

  ‘No one knows. After he was posted to Trieste, he fell off the map. But it’s probably likely he used ratlines to get himself out of Europe and across to South America. That’s what a lot of the Nazi fugitives did: Eichmann, Mengele, Stangl himself.

  He got out and he stayed hidden.’ Reardon paused, a quiet, contemplative silence on the line. Then, softly: ‘He might never have been seen again if it hadn’t have been for Carrie.’

  I looked at the picture on the monitor, the Jewish families being led off the train and away from the platform, the children desperately clinging to their mothers, and anger flooded my system. Then my eyes shifted to Kalb, who was standing there watching them. He disappeared in 1943 until a single photograph, taken in 1971, put him in Los Angeles. Then suddenly – forty-one years later – his body washes up on a beach in south Devon.

  How the hell does all this fit together?

  ‘Wh
en Carrie said she thought she might have found evidence that Daniel Kalb had been alive and well in America in the early seventies, well, you can imagine my …’

  I tuned out and tabbed on to the next picture.

  It was a top-down artist’s impression of Sobibór. Then on to the next, a photograph I barely had the stomach to look at: bodies piled up in a heap, discarded like their lives meant nothing. Men. Women. Kids. Then the next: Kalb in another official photograph, this time in the uniform of the Obersturmführer when he’d been running the camp in 1943. He had three silver pips and a silver stripe on his collar. The background was blank, just a wall of grey, but the scar was visible on his face now.

  What connects you to Cornell?

  I sat there, staring at him.

  And then a thought came to me.

  It wasn’t just the scar Healy had mentioned to me in the conversation we’d had about the body on the beach. He’d also said that Kalb had had sand in his lungs.

  Tiny traces of it. It’s not local.

  So where’s it from?

  Same story as the skin. Results not yet in.

  I thought of Carter Graham’s Los Angeles office, rising up out of the Californian earth. I knew Kalb was in the States at that moment, possibly living there. I could put him in Marina Del Rey, in an actual location. But what if he wasn’t actually based in LA?

  What if he’d just been up for the weekend?

  I thought of something Healy had spotted that very first day: the body had been frozen. You’d freeze a body to preserve it. You’d freeze a body if you were taking it a distance.

  I took him out in that box, Prouse had said to me, and suddenly it all started to fall into place. Kalb had been packed into a freezer box as a way to hide him. Cornell, for whatever reason, had decided to take Kalb’s body on a five-thousand-mile trip.

  That’s why Kalb had traces of sand in his lungs.

  Because he and Cornell had both lived in Las Vegas.

  And Las Vegas was in the desert.

  58

  There were three pictures left. As I moved to the next, an old colour shot of a woman in her forties sitting on a wall, my phone started buzzing. I’d forgotten to turn it off again after talking to Reardon. Now Rocastle was calling. He would have been at Farnmoor for a couple of hours by now. He’d have seen what carnage Cornell’s men had caused. Now he was looking for someone to blame. I watched the phone moving towards me, its purr loud in the silence of the room. Outside, the sky was darkening above the treeline.

  What I should have done was turn the phone off.

  But he needed to hear some things.

  So I pressed Answer.

  ‘I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing, but I’m going to find you,’ he said, immediately on the attack. ‘Have you even got one clue what I just stumbled into?’

  He meant Farnmoor. I played it safe: ‘Is Graham all right?’

  ‘Is he all right ?’ A snort. ‘I think he’s pretty far from all right.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Don’t feed me that shit, Raker.’

  He’d already made up his mind that I had something to do with what happened at the house. That’s how I’d thought it might go. ‘You’re angry. But you need to listen to me.’

  ‘I’m going to work night and day picking away at this fantasy you’re building,’ he continued, as if I hadn’t even replied. ‘I’m going to prove you lied to me. I’m going to find out about all the horseshit you’ve probably fed me on the Ling family, on Prouse, on what happened here. I’m going to get the files for every case you’ve ever worked and I’m going to pick them apart one by one until I’ve got enough to send you down.’

  ‘Are you finished?’

  ‘Am I finished?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The man who did this is the same man who killed Prouse. He’s the same man who took the Lings. His name is Jeremy Cornell. He’s protecting–’

  ‘Doesn’t it ever end?’

  ‘– a guy called Daniel Kalb who–’

  ‘Doesn’t it ever end with you?’ he said again. ‘Huh? It’s always someone else’s fault; it’s always someone else who told the lie. This is your fault. You think we had any of this down here before you arrived? This is the fucking countryside, not some inner-city ghetto! Everyone here was doing fine until you rocked up. Now look at what we’ve got.’

  ‘He’s white, early forties, has black hair and–’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Rocastle–’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘You need to find this man.’

  ‘I don’t need to do–’

  ‘Listen to me. You find this man and it ends. Understand? I can prove this arsehole is behind everything, and I’m willing to meet you and give you everything I have. But I’m not turning up to any meeting where all you care about is putting me in handcuffs.’

  ‘You’re unbelievable, you know that?’

  ‘Is that a no?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Then this conversation is over.’

  I ended the call, shut my phone down, and removed the battery and the SIM. Then my eyes returned to the old colour shot of the woman sitting on the wall. Next to her was a garden full of flowers, beautiful roses in full bloom. Beyond that was a rock face of some kind, rising up and beyond the top of the frame. Like the pictures of modern-day Sobibór, this one had a stamp in the corner too: © Devonshire Historical Society.

  I tabbed through to the next one.

  It was an old black-and-white picture, seemingly taken about the same time as the last photograph: a big group of people gathered together in a street. Men were in the back row, women in the middle, kids knelt at the front. They were all smiling for the camera.

  Same stamp in the corner.

  I counted up the faces: forty-one. Twelve men, thirteen women, sixteen kids. That made forty-two if you threw in the photographer. Around them were indistinct buildings, difficult to make out. I cast my eyes along them, trying to see if any of the men were Kalb. They weren’t. There was a wide age range among the adults – some looked in their early twenties, some were probably touching ninety – and by their fashion, by their hairstyles, which was all I had to go on again, I’d have put the period as late 1960s.

  Then I saw the same woman from the previous picture.

  She was right on the end of the line of women, smiling broadly. I would have definitely put her in her late forties now. She was plump but dressed smartly, like she’d just come from work, in a cream blouse and a matching navy blue skirt and jacket. There was something sewn to both shoulders of her jacket, some kind of embroidered patch.

  I clicked through to the last picture.

  It was a shot of the same woman, again dressed in the same clothes, but this time with a dark coat over the top. She was back on the wall I’d seen her on in the first photo. The roses were gone, but, judging by the coat and the trace of breath in front of her face, this was because it was winter. Off to her right was the cliff face I’d seen in the first shot of her, rising up and out of the frame; off to her left was a building, a house, with a brass nameplate on it.

  I’ve seen the house before.

  Not here. Not in these pictures. But I knew it. Around her was a vast swathe of blue.

  It wasn’t sky.

  It was sea.

  I knew who this woman was now. I didn’t know her name, but I knew what the embroidered patches on her shoulders were: she was a harbour mistress. She was sitting on the wall of her garden watching boats coming in, because that was her job. That was the role she served in the village she lived in. All the others, all the people in the previous shot, were her neighbours. The pub landlord. The minister at the chapel. The manager of the general store. And all forty-two of them were dead by October 1968.

  This was Miln Cross before the storm.

  I wondered for a moment about the photographer. Mos
t likely, they were someone visiting for the day. A friend. A relative. But even while I saw the logic in that, I couldn’t quite dispel another thought: that the Miln Cross pictures were in with the shots of Kalb, of Sobibór, of its awful, barbaric history, because Carrie had found something else out.

  That Kalb had been here at some point.

  That, before he went to the States, he might even have called it home.

  And the reason he wasn’t in the shot, the reason he insisted on taking the picture himself, was because he never wanted to be. The villagers might not have known who he was – but, if he got photographed, if he got caught on film, someone, somewhere might.

  Now, almost forty-five years later, Miln Cross was just a tomb for the people who’d died in the storm.

  And, I realized, for Paul and Carrie Ling.

  As I looked at the house behind the harbour mistress, I remembered going inside it. I’d been all the way through to its extension and I’d stood and looked out to sea only feet from where Prouse must have buried them. I was supposed to put the old man in Haven, the same place I’d put the husband and wife. My eyes drifted over the woman’s shoulders.

  To the name on the brass plate.

  Haven.

  59

  As I reached the other side of the water, a shaft of moonlight pierced the clouds, arcing down out of the sky and hitting the middle of the village. I climbed up, out of the boat, on to the rocks, and paused there; one hand clinging to the raft, the other gripping what was left of the bridge on this side. Ahead of me, the main street in Miln Cross was temporarily lit, its broken cobbles, its collapsed roofs, its lonely, decaying buildings. But on the edges of the moonlight, in the places it didn’t reach, there was only a thick, impenetrable dark.

  I looked at my watch.

  Seven-thirty.

  I secured the boat in the same place I’d done the first time, then hoisted myself up on to the main street. Below the plateau the village was on, waves sloshed and gurgled, massaged by the cold wind that swept in across the bay. I was chilled already, my hands frozen from the rowing, my clothes dotted with seawater, but I pushed it from my mind.