by Paul Sussman
He said this rather wistfully, as though boring Khalifa with all the details was something that would have given him a great deal of pleasure. The detective sensed this and said nothing, anxious to get to the point.
'Anyway,' continued the banker after a momentary pause, realizing he wasn't going to get the hoped-for invitation to expound, 'it seems the eagle and swastika was the refining mark of the Prussian State Mint, which was, until the end of the Second World War, Germany's national mint. Based in Berlin.'
Khalifa stared at the ingot, lianas of cigarette smoke winding upwards from the corners of his mouth.
'That in itself wasn't too hard to discover. Just a quick flick through some standard reference books, a couple of phone calls. Where the story gets more complex' – he grasped the ingot in both hands and, with an effort, turned it over – 'is with these.'
He pointed to a row of tiny numerals, barely visible, incised into the metal at the top left-hand corner of the bar's underside. Khalifa let out a grunt of surprise. He had completely missed the numbers on his initial, admittedly cursory examination of the ingot.
'Serial number?' he asked uncertainly.
'Exactly. Some bars have them, some don't. When they do, it basically allows you to trace the bar's history – when it was smelted, where, that sort of thing.'
'And this one?'
'Oh, this one has been very informative. Yes, yes, very informative. But it's not been easy. The numbers aren't part of a universal system or anything. They simply refer to a paper record at whatever institution happened to mint the bar. I spent half of yesterday and most of this morning on the phone to Germany trying to trace it. The Prussian State Mint archives were either destroyed or scattered after 1945. The Bundesbank don't have any records. To be honest I'd just about given up, until someone in the Bundesbank museum suggested I try contacting . . .' He paused a moment, flicking through his report. 'The Degussa Corporation. In Dusseldorf. They used to be one of Germany's main smelting companies. Did a lot of work for the Nazis, by all accounts. Perfectly above board now, of course. Various diverse interests—'
'Yes, yes,' cut in Khalifa impatiently. 'But what did you find?'
'Well, the archivist at Degussa – nice fellow, very polite' – he put a slight emphasis on this last word, implying that the archivist at Degussa would never dream of interrupting anyone mid-sentence, as Khalifa had just done – 'had a trawl through their records, and amazingly he managed to come up with a serial number match. So efficient, the Germans.'
'And?' Khalifa's face was hovering directly above the ingot, a long cylinder of ash pivoting precariously at the end of his cigarette.
'Well, it seems that the ingot was one of a batch of fifty cast by Degussa in 1944. May 1944, to be precise. They were handed over to the State Mint on the seventeenth of that month and from there passed on to the Reichsbank, the forerunner of the Bundesbank.'
'And after that?'
'It seems that most of them got melted down and recast at the end of the war.'
'Most of them?'
'Well, this one obviously survived. And according to the Degussa man, so did at least two others.'
He paused for effect, drawing himself up like an actor about to deliver a soliloquy.
'They were found in Buenos Aires. In 1966. By Israeli secret agents. In the house of a man called . . .' He consulted his report again. 'Julius Schechtmann. A former Nazi army officer who had escaped to Argentina at the end of the war and lived there ever since, under an assumed name. The Israelis tracked him down and brought him and the bars back to Israel. They're now held at the Central Bank of Jerusalem.'
'And Schechtmann?'
Again that pause for dramatic effect, that drawing up of the shoulders.
'The Israelis hanged him.'
There was a sharp clanging sound as outside a gas vendor passed beneath the window in his donkey-drawn cart, banging the stacked metal cylinders with a spanner to alert potential customers to his presence. Khalifa's cigarette had burnt itself out and, flicking the butt into the waste-basket, he lit himself another, rubbing his eyes with his thumb and first finger. Everything about this case, every new piece of information – it just seemed to get more and more twisted and bewildering. He felt as if he was underwater, frantically trying to fight his way to the surface only somehow to drive himself deeper with every desperate sweep of his arms.
There was a long silence.
'Anything else?' he asked eventually, a weariness to his voice, as if he was wondering how many more turns the investigation could possibly take.
Hasoon shrugged. 'Not really. There are a few technical details about the actual composition of the gold, but they're probably not of much relevance.'
He ran his hand over the bar again, wiping away the flecks of cigarette ash that had settled themselves on its shiny surface, then wrapped it back up in the length of black cloth.
'You want to keep it here?'
Khalifa pulled on his cigarette.
'Can you hold it at the bank for me?'
'Our pleasure.'
Hasoon locked the ingot back in the case, then crossed to the windows and heaved open the shutters, blinking in the sharp afternoon sunlight. From below came a discordant babble of voices and the receding clank of the gas-vendor's cart.
'Actually, there was one thing,' Hasoon said, his voice suddenly subdued, thoughtful. 'Odd. Upsetting, really. Rather spoilt the lustre.' He curled his right foot behind his left leg and rubbed the face of his shoe up and down the calf. 'As I said, the serial number allows you to trace the date and place of the ingot's casting. In some cases extra information is recorded: the name of the foreman in charge of the smelting, the person at the mint who commissioned it, that sort of thing. Minor details.' He changed legs, rubbing his left shoe against his right calf. 'The Degussa files didn't have any of that. What they did have was a record of where the smelted gold came from in the first place.'
He finished polishing and turned towards Khalifa, slowly, hand fiddling nervously with the windowsill. The detective raised his eyebrows questioningly.
'Apparently it came from Auschwitz. It seems, inspector, your ingot is made from gold extracted from the teeth of dead Jews.'
After the banker had left, Khalifa sat staring up at the office ceiling, legs crossed on the corner of his desk, wreaths of cigarette smoke winding themselves around his head like a turban. There were things he should be getting on with: Hassani was hassling him for a report on his progress so far; Jansen's friend in Cairo still hadn't got in touch and needed to be chased up; and it probably wouldn't hurt if he put in a phone call to that damned Israeli either, checked that he'd got off his fat backside and started making the requested enquiries into Schlegel's past. So much to do. So much ground to cover. And all he could do was sit staring up at the ceiling, thinking about gold fillings, and shattered teeth, and the procession of mould-coloured numbers tattooed on Hannah Schlegel's forearm.
He knew about the Holocaust, of course, about Auschwitz. General things, rumours, not precise details – it was never something he'd felt the need to look into. He certainly accepted it had happened, the Israeli detective had been wrong when he'd accused him of not believing in it. At the same time it seemed so distant, so abstract, not something that had any relevance to him or his world. Until now. Now it seemed to have become very relevant.
He dropped his head back and blew a succession of lazy smoke-rings, the doughnut-shaped hoops of vapour chasing one another upwards to the ceiling where they broke and disintegrated into a dim, lingering haze. Five minutes passed, ten, the clock on the wall clacking out the seconds like the beat of a mechanical heart. Then, as if coming to a decision, he swung his feet to the floor, grabbed his jacket and left the station.
On the street he turned right, then left, working his way through the bustling afternoon crowd into the heart of the town's souk, past cafes, souvenir emporia and spice stalls piled high with heaps of hibiscus petals and powdery red saffron, before fina
lly ducking into a brightly lit internet cafe with half a dozen computers ranged along the back wall. He nodded a greeting at the owner, a boy with gelled hair and a belt-buckle fashioned in the shape of a motorcycle, who pointed him to the furthest computer on the left, next to a European girl with badly sunburned shoulders. He went over, sat down and, after a moment's hesitation, logged on to Yahoo! and typed 'Holocaust' into the subject field, wincing slightly as he did so, like a child flicking its hand into a fire – afraid, yet at the same time anxious to know what the flames will feel like.
JERUSALEM – THE OLD CITY
'What have we ever done to them that they should come here and tell us how to run our country? Are we not even permitted to defend ourselves now? Meshugina! All of them! Meshugina!'
The old man rattled his Yediot Ahronot angrily, his saggy, thin-lipped mouth puckering up into a rictus of indignant fury, like a slug that has had salt poured on it.
Ben-Roi took a swig of his beer and stared at the object of the man's ire – a front-page story about a group of European peace activists who had come to Israel to protest at the three-hundred-kilometre security wall the government was erecting between Israel and the West Bank. The accompanying photograph showed an English comedian Ben-Roi had never heard of linking arms with a group of Palestinians in front of an IDF bulldozer, under the caption CELEBRITIES CONDEMN 'APARTHEID' BARRIER.
'Nazis!' cried the old man, crumpling the newspaper as if he was trying to strangle it. 'This is what they call us. See here? My brother died in Buchenwald and they call me a Nazi! Shame on them! Shame on the dirty goyim!'
He cast the newspaper aside and slumped back in his chair, shaking his head. For a brief instant Ben-Roi thought of saying something, telling the man how he too despised these foreign do-gooders, the way they came over here to moan and condemn before scuttling back to their nice secure homes in their nice secure countries, congratulating themselves on being such wonderful, caring human beings while behind them women and children were being blown to offal by the poor old oppressed fucking Palestinians.
He said nothing, however, worried that if he started into the subject the fury would swiftly take over, filling him with a blinding, sludgy blackness so that before he knew what was happening he would be shouting and raging and banging his fists on the table, making a spectacle of himself. No, he thought, it was better just to hold his own counsel. Safer.
He reached up and grasped the menorah hanging around his neck, squeezing it, as though to try and force something back inside him, then, downing the remainder of his beer, he stood, slapped a twenty-shekel note onto the table and set off up the road to see what he could dig up about the murdered woman for that damned Egyptian.
Shabbier and less exclusive than the surrounding blocks, Ohr Ha-Chaim was a gloomy, claustrophobic street right at the top end of the Jewish Quarter, up near the Armenian sector, with a sloping paved floor worn shiny by the ceaseless slap of feet, and high houses pressing in on either side like the walls of a vice. Number forty-six was about halfway along, a dour stone building whose upper section was divided into apartments – empty washing lines drooped in slack parabolas from many of the windows – and whose basement was occupied by a cramped yeshiva with its own separate entrance. On arrival, Ben-Roi consulted the crumpled sheet of notepaper on which he had scribbled the details the Egyptian had given him the previous afternoon, then went up to the main door and pressed the intercom buzzer for flat four.
He could have got down here sooner – it wasn't as if he'd had a lot to do over the last twenty-four hours – but he hadn't liked the Egyptian's tone and didn't feel inclined to do him any favours. He'd actually been thinking of leaving it even longer, especially after yesterday evening when, despite the fact that Ben-Roi had specifically told him he didn't want them, the little prick had faxed over a whole spew of case notes, in the process jamming his fax machine which had beeped and squealed at him like a whining child until, in a fury of frustration, he'd ended up ripping it from its socket and throwing it across the room.
No, he didn't feel the remotest urge to be helpful. In the end, however, he'd decided he might as well get it over and done with, before Khediva or whatever the hell his name was started phoning up and badgering him, as he almost certainly would do, the pestering little cunt. So here he was.
He pressed the buzzer again, glancing down through the basement window at the rows of young Haredi men hunched over their Talmuds, their pe'ot dangling like spaniels' tails, their faces pale and sickly-looking behind their glasses (Jerusalem, he'd once heard, had the highest concentration of opticians of any city in the world). A slight scowl twisted his mouth – 'penguins' Galia used to call them – and, looking up again, he pressed the buzzer a third time, this one finally drawing a response.
'Shalom?'
A young woman was leaning out of a window above, her plump face framed by the traditional shekel wig worn by Orthodox Jewish wives. He explained who he was and why he was there.
'We've only just moved in,' said the woman. 'And the people before us were only here for a couple of years.'
'Before them?'
The woman shrugged, turning to shout something at someone behind her.
'You want to talk to Mrs Weinberg,' she said, looking down again. 'At number two. She's been here for thirty years. Knows everyone. And everything.'
From her tone it was clear she thought Mrs Weinberg was an interfering old busybody. Ben-Roi thanked her and, flicking his eyes across the intercom panel, jabbed the buzzer for flat two. He had barely withdrawn his finger when the front door creaked open to reveal a tiny wizened old lady, little taller than a child, wearing a crimplene housecoat and cheap slippers, her hands bunched and twisted with arthritis.
'Mrs Weinberg?' He pulled out his ID. 'My name is Inspector Ben-Roi of the—'
She let out a little gasp, bringing a hand up to her throat. 'Oh God! What's happened? It's Samuel, isn't it? Tell me what's happened to him!'
He assured her that nothing had happened to Samuel, whoever he was; he simply wished to ask her some questions. About a woman who used to live in the flat above. For a moment she didn't seem to believe him, her chest heaving, her eyes moist with frightened tears. Gradually she calmed down and, with a motion of her hand, beckoned him into her flat, which was on the building's ground floor, to the right of the entrance hall.
'Samuel's my grandson,' she explained as they went. 'The best boy in the world. They've got him down in Gaza, God help us, on his national service. Every time I turn on the news, whenever the phone rings . . . I can't sleep for worry. He's just a boychik, a child. They're all just children.'
She directed him into a small living room, cramped and gloomy, with a large wooden dresser at one end and two armchairs arranged in front of an old black and white television set, on top of which sat a cage with a yellow budgerigar inside. There were photographs everywhere, and a lingering smell of something sweet and rather unpleasant – exactly what, Ben-Roi couldn't work out. Bird-shit, maybe, or cooking fat. He tried not to dwell on it. From somewhere else in the flat he could hear the babble of Israel Army Radio.
The old woman prodded him into one of the armchairs and disappeared for a moment, turning off the radio before returning with a glass of orange juice, which she handed to him. He hadn't asked for it but accepted it anyway, taking a polite sip and laying it on a small table beside his chair. She settled herself in the other chair, picked up a tangled spaghetti of blue and white wool from the floor and started to knit, the needles held almost directly in front of her face, her hands moving with surprising dexterity for one so bent and arthritic. She seemed to be making a yarmulke, part of its circumference already realized at the end of the twin strands of wool, and Ben-Roi smiled faintly to himself, recalling an old family story about his grandmother, his father's mother, who during the 1967 war had knitted matching red skullcaps for every man in her son's artillery company, over fifty of them, the company as a result gaining the nickname the Blazing Yar
mulkes, a title which, so far as he knew, they still bore to this day.
'So, what are these questions?'
'Hmm?'
'You said you wanted to ask me some questions. About flat four.'
'Yes, of course.'
He glanced down at the sheet of notepaper he was still holding in his hand, trying to gather his thoughts.
'Is it about that Goldstein woman? Because if I said it once, I said it a hundred times – she's going to come to a bad end. Three years she was here, and when she left the whole block applauded. I remember once, it was a Friday, Shabbat for God's sake—'
'It's about someone called Hannah Schlegel,' said Ben-Roi, butting in.
The clack of the needles slowed and stopped.
'Oh.'
'The woman above said you might have known her.'
She stared at her knitting for a moment, then laid it in her lap and sat back.