Bill and his brother had worked the West End clubs as doormen sometimes back in the late fifties and early sixties. Mainly for Maltese mobsters, but they weren’t frightened of them. Two hard Gypsy boys on the make could easily take a handful of ‘Maltesers’ as Bill liked to call them.
‘It was the first day of the fair, called Mitchells back in them days,’ Bill said. ‘I was putting punters on the big wheel. Couples mainly, the girls pretending they was frightened to get their fellas to put their arms round them. Course, all the fellas wanted to do was grab their tits.’ Then he said to the woman called Mumtaz, ‘Sorry, love.’
But she smiled. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Suddenly there’s all this screaming,’ he said. ‘Up on the wheel all I could see was people running about like blue-arsed flies. I wanna go and have a look. But then I get told to stay where I am because a baby’s gone missing and the coppers are coming. Geezers shouting about how they’ve closed the park. But I don’t think they did. They did come quick, though. I dunno how. No mobile phones in them days, someone must’ve gone to the phone box up Faircross.’
‘Faircross?’ Mumtaz asked.
‘It’s a parade of shops on Longbridge Road,’ Vi answered. ‘So what did the coppers do, Bill?’
‘Went all over,’ he said. ‘In caravans, through all the sideshows, in waggons, on the rides. But not just the coppers – we all looked. Little girl like that goes missing, you have to have a heart of granite not to want to help her. I saw the mother, poor thing.’
‘What was she like?’
‘When I saw her, it was like she’d turned to stone. When she first found the baby gone she screamed and screamed. But when I got to her she was just sat on the mud outside the helter-skelter, staring at nothing. Looked like she’d seen the dead. I tell you what occurred to me, shall I? What I thought was that by the look of her, that woman knew her kiddie had gone for good. I can’t tell you how I knew it, but I knew it.’
‘Gypsy magic,’ Vi said.
Bill laughed. ‘Cor blimey,’ he said, ‘don’t let our Gilda hear you say that. She goes to the WI now and her Reg joined the golf club last year.’ He shook his head. ‘Story was the lady had left the kiddie in her pram when she had to go to the toilets. When she come out the little ’un had gone.’
‘And nobody saw anything?’ Arnold asked.
‘I’m not the coppers so I don’t know,’ Bill said. ‘But I never heard about no witnesses.’ He shook his head. ‘What I do remember is all the freaks running about all over the place.’
‘Uncle Bill …’
‘Nah! I don’t mean what you think,’ he said to Vi. Then he turned to Lee. ‘Everyone’s frightened to say anything these days, don’t you find, boy? Political correctness?’
Lee said nothing. He’d heard the word ‘freak’ applied to all sorts over the years, including young people, Goths and foreigners.
‘I mean, real freaks,’ Bill said. ‘Bearded ladies, lobster men, Siamese twins. Done a roaring trade, the old freak show. But the coppers going in frightened the poor sods rigid. I remember the Siamese twins particularly because they separated and ran in two different directions.’ He laughed. ‘That was a common con back in the day. Lot of ’em didn’t even look the same. I remember one set was different heights …’
‘Lee,’ Mumtaz said, ‘didn’t our client write something about Siamese twins?’
‘Yes,’ Lee said. He looked at the old man. ‘Our client, a relative who was a kid at the time, said he was at the freak show when the baby was taken.’
‘Oh, it was always jammed with punters,’ Bill said. ‘People like to look at those less fortunate than themselves. Human nature, ain’t it?’ Then he frowned. ‘You working for the Levy baby’s brother?’
Neither Lee nor Mumtaz said anything.
‘Thought you might be,’ he said. ‘Rich family of diamond dealers, I heard. Some copper told me. Said they had to take the little lad because his mother was off her head. That copper reckoned someone’d took the baby so he could get money off the father. Kidnapped.’
Mumtaz said, ‘Miriam was never found.’
‘That we know,’ the old man said. ‘Maybe if she was kidnapped, whoever had her killed her. Or p’raps the father did pay up, but never got her back. You wanna talk to the coppers.’ He looked at Vi.
She said, ‘Contacts over at Barking are few and far between. Mostly young lads who don’t know where Barking Creek is these days.’
Bill laughed. ‘Oh, fuck me, Barking Creek!’ he said. ‘We used to go down there when I was a nipper and we was still on the road. Good atching tan, the old creek. Nobody bothered you.’
Seeing the confusion on Lee and Mumtaz’s faces, Vi translated. ‘Atching tan is a Romany stopping place.’ Then she said to Bill, ‘Don’t let Gilda hear you talk the old language, she’ll have a fit!’
He laughed. ‘Let her.’ But then his face darkened and he said, ‘Tell you what, though, one thing I do remember now is where that copper who spoke to me come from.’
‘What kind of copper?’ Vi asked. ‘Uniform? Constable? Detective?’
‘Young lad in a uniform,’ Bill said. ‘Never knew his name, nothing about his rank. Why would I? But we did share a fag and I did know his face. Lived down the Creek.’
SIX
He looked at the e-mail and then at the certificate. Rachel Levy, his mother, had died of bone cancer. Slow and painful, it had taken a couple of years to eat her slight body. He remembered the way she’d borne the pain, her face pulled into agonised grimaces as she attempted not to show her distress.
There was nothing about tuberculosis. There never had been. It had been his father, Manny, who had coughed. But then most men smoked in those days, his old man being no exception. But not Rachel.
Irving put his mother’s death certificate down and rubbed his face with his hands. The consultant could show him all the test results under the sun to demonstrate he was in remission, but he still felt rough. Too rough to go to Berlin; too rough to stand up to what might await him in Rachel’s old house on Grabbeallee. Lee Arnold and Mumtaz Hakim had discovered more in one day than he’d found out in a year. But then Irving knew that he’d never really tried. Not properly. Even before the DNA test he’d known that something about his mother had been wrong, but he didn’t know what. Then when he found out that she hadn’t been Jewish his mind hadn’t been able to take it. Or his body. It hadn’t just been the chemotherapy that had made him so sick at that time.
Now, according to the Arnold Agency, he had a Nazi in the family too. Augustin Maria Baum. Irving had never heard of him. But then he’d died before World War II and so maybe he’d managed not to do very much harm. Irving knew that was probably a lie, but it made him feel better and so he went with it. No matter that when Arnold and Mrs Hakim went to Berlin they may well find out Baum had been a monster. That was all in the future.
Sara Metzler knew that anything was possible. Especially in her city, especially amongst the Jews. Survival in Berlin cellars and cupboards, sometimes for the entire duration of the war was just another of those Jewish miracle stories old people told to keep themselves alive. That it was incredible meant little to them. Only that they were true.
When the woman had phoned from London, Sara felt that she too, this Mrs Hakim, had been almost embarrassed by the story she told. A Jewish woman found by a British soldier in a house in Spandau. What was so amazing about that? Well, the fact that it had been a British soldier who had found her in that sector was odd. Surely by that time the woman would have been some Russian officer’s property? And then there was the connection between the Austerlitz family and Augustin Maria Baum. Just thinking about his name made her skin crawl.
Baum hadn’t been a major force in the National Socialist Party. In terms of anti-Semitic acts he’d done nothing. But he’d written much. His subject had been philosophy, which he’d taught at the prestigious Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He had used his position to publish papers with
titles like ‘Racial Purity – The Necessity of Segregation’. There were photographs of him shaking Hitler’s hand. Sara hadn’t managed to establish how he might have been related to a family called Reichman, but that was for later.
Her immediate problem was telling Mrs Hakim who now lived in the Austerlitz family’s old house on Grabbeallee. The British woman had told her that she wanted to come to Berlin, see the house and, possibly, take photographs on behalf of her client. But given what Sara had just discovered from a colleague about the occupant of Grabbeallee 67, that may present a few problems.
One of them touched her arm and Eva cringed.
‘What do you want?’
She spoke English. She knew they understood. Which one of them was it, anyway?
The twin hooked a long fingernail through the weave of her jumper and began to move. Eva followed. There was no point talking; they only spoke to her father.
Luckily, the journey was short although far from sweet. The twin left Eva in front of the unattended toffee apple stand. So her granddaughter had sodded off again.
Eva served the customers waiting for apples and then went to look for Amber. She found her beyond the Drop Tower, where some woman was screaming fit to wet herself, behind a defunct coconut shy. She’d rigged up a makeshift swing and attached it to the branch of a tree. It looked dodgy. But then even if it hadn’t, Eva would have disapproved.
‘Did Nagyapa put you up to this?’ Eva said once Amber had reached the ground.
‘No …’ She looked away.
‘You want to fly like he did, you have to start when you’re a toddler,’ Eva said. ‘It’s too late now. Give it up.’
‘No,’ her granddaughter said. ‘Nagyapa says I can still fly and I can. You and Mum and Dad just don’t want me to because you’re scared.’
‘Yes,’ Eva said, ‘and with good cause. You have no idea about the terrible things that happened when Nagyapa flew. He just tells you what he knows you want to hear. You’ve no idea about him!’
Amber picked up her shoes and slung them over her back by their laces. ‘You’re always so horrible to Nagyapa. You hate him because you have to look after him.’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I don’t hate him,’ Eva said. She didn’t, in spite of everything. ‘I just don’t trust him and neither should you. You’ve no idea who he is.’
‘Oh, and you have?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Eva said. ‘I know who he is. And if I wasn’t his daughter, I’d walk across the other side of the street to get away from him.’
Lee was glad to get out of the office. The silence around Mumtaz as she read about the Soviet occupation of Berlin was too much for him. She so obviously didn’t want to talk. Vi’s phone call had been a godsend.
It was lunchtime and so they met at Nathan’s Pies and Eels on the Barking Road. They both had the works – pie, mash, liquor and hot eels.
Vi, whose treat this was, said, ‘Thought I’d better have a word after Uncle Bill’s performance yesterday.’
Lee smiled. ‘I liked him.’
‘Crooked as a fiddler’s elbow.’
‘So tell me something I don’t know,’ Lee said.
He knew she was in the middle of a massive London-wide investigation into the supply of so-called legal highs, like Spice and Mamba, to homeless people in the capital. So he was grateful she’d made time for him. But then maybe she’d wanted some time out from what had to be a difficult and depressing investigation? Those on the streets, particularly people with mental health issues, were being deliberately targeted by dealers who liked the fact that the most vulnerable in society were also the most silent. Addiction had always been a wonderful gag.
‘I never said nothing because I didn’t want to have a row with the old scrote, but that copper Bill said he spoke to at the fair in ’62 couldn’t have lived down Barking Creek because there was no houses down there by then. All of them got destroyed by the floods in 1953. Whoever he was, he would’ve been moved out to the council estate at Thames View by that time,’ Vi said.
‘I spoke to a DS called Roy Wilkinson over at Barking on the phone this morning,’ Lee said. ‘I met him once back in the dark ages. He said he’d have a scout around when he’s got a minute.’
Vi dug into a large piece of eel and closed her eyes for a moment as she chewed. Bliss. She said, ‘Well, don’t worry too much about it because our own Tony Bracci may be able to help you out.’
Why hadn’t Lee thought of that? Vi’s DS, Tony Bracci, came from a family of Italian ice sellers who’d started their business in Barking Creek.
‘Only thought of it this morning,’ Vi said. ‘He’s on leave today, but I’ll get him to give you a shout tomorrow.’
He thanked her. Then she said, ‘Had a phone call from young Shazia the other day. She’s doing criminology at Manchester.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Did you know she’s living with the Huqs?’
Of course he did and Vi would know that, but what she didn’t realise was why. Which was the reason she was asking.
Lee kept his head down. ‘Yeah. Dunno why.’
He saw Vi shake her head.
‘What?’
‘I know you know,’ Vi said. ‘So share.’
‘It’s between Mumtaz and Shazia,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but …’
Lee suspected Vi knew what he’d done with Mumtaz and he could see she was jealous. She always had been, in spite of the fact, as far as he was concerned, that she and he were just ‘fuck buddies’.
‘If you want to know, ask Mumtaz or Shazia,’ Lee said.
Vi put another piece of eel into her mouth and said, ‘You’re no fun.’
‘The name of the man who now owns the Austerlitz family house is Gunther Beltz,’ the woman Mumtaz had come to know as ‘Sara’ said. ‘He is fifty-five, retired and he was an East Berliner until 1989, like me. I didn’t know him in those days, I should say, although a colleague of mine did. But of course, he was a member of the Party – we all were.’
‘The communist party?’
‘Of course. There was no other party in the German Democratic Republic, what we call the DDR. It was not permitted. All were members of the Party, which took care of people’s needs for education, healthcare, housing. Provided you always kept to the Party line.’
Mumtaz had been a child when the Berlin Wall had come down, when people from the East had demonstrated their hunger for the freedom to choose a system that wasn’t controlled by the Party.
‘What is unusual about Herr Beltz is that he inherited the Austerlitz house from his father.’
Mumtaz frowned. ‘Unusual?’ she said. ‘How?’
‘Mumtaz, the DDR was a communist state,’ Sara said. ‘No one owned property. Only those at the very top of the Party could do such a thing, but they were very careful to keep that from the people. Only when the Wall came down did we realise how much they had lied to us.’
‘So this Herr Beltz was an MP or something?’
‘No,’ Sara said. ‘But there are a group of people we don’t know all the names of even now. Although this man’s name was known. Many have been put in prison since Unification. But not all. Not him. There are still, we know, members of the security force known as the Staatssicherheitsdienst, who tortured and killed for the Party, loose on our streets.’
Mumtaz was shocked. She said, ‘This man may be one of them?’
‘He was one of them.’
‘And this Staat … I’m sorry I can’t say it. Who …’
‘Oh, they were also known as the Stasi,’ Sara said. ‘One in four East Germans belonged. I expect you have heard of that name. Gunther Beltz was a member of the Stasi.’
It was one of those days. Firstly, the carrots she was going to use for that evening’s soup had boiled over onto the kitchen floor, then her bra had collapsed. Not that what Lesley Jones called her ‘norks’ were so big they’d burst free. It was just that the bra
itself had given up the ghost. Henry the Jack Russell was younger than that bra. So was Techno.
At sixty-two, Lesley wasn’t old enough to get a pension, but she wasn’t working either. After art school she’d been an art teacher and then, more latterly, a police forensic artist for the Met. But she’d fallen out badly with the police, mainly because of the way she treated witnesses to crime. Which was, were one to be generous, more ‘direct’ than was strictly necessary. Had Lesley not bought a large, semi-derelict house in Tufnell Park back in the late seventies, she would be what Lee Arnold would call ‘skint’. But she had bought that vast house, which she now lived in together with a shifting population of young tenants who paid her a fortune to exist in a place without central heating.
Lesley looked at her computer screen and frowned. Age progressing from a picture of an infant was always a challenge. But this one had been especially tough – hence the lack of attention she’d paid to the carrots. The bra was just age.
A knock at the front door meant that either one of the tenants had lost his or her keys on the Tube or Lee Arnold had arrived. Either way, Henry barked and jumped up and down wetting himself. Just in case it was Arnold, Lesley put the dog in the garden. Henry didn’t like men.
She had to squeeze past two pushbikes, her own beloved motorbike and a Victorian painting of Gladstone to get to the front door where she found the only copper she’d managed to get in with when she’d once, briefly, worked for Newham CID. In fact, Lesley had fancied her chances of a romance with him.
When she thought about it, Sara Metzler had heard the name ‘Austerlitz’ before, in connection with the Hollywood musical star, Fred Astaire. But the family of the pharmacist Dieter Austerlitz and his wife, Miriam, had been unknown to her. This happened. New victims of the Nazis were still coming to light and probably would continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
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