Dead Men Living

by Brian Freemantle

  “I don’t yet know how or why, but I believe art is the most obvious factor: something to do with its looting. But not that by itself. There’s a lot more.”

  “Simon despised the Nazis, Rosenberg’s lot, for what they did to art. And the Russians’ Trophy Brigades. Judged one as bad as the other. He knew it would be impossible to reassemble the European art heritage, no matter how hard he and others like him tried.” The man stopped, pointedly. “You imagine you’ll ever find out who killed him?”

  Charlie hesitated. “Who committed the actual murders, probably not, not after fifty years. They would have been functionaries.” Which was true, he realized. It had been a Russian bullet that killed Simon Norrington.

  “What about the people who ordered it?”

  “That’s who I’m trying to find. If I do, we’ll know why.”

  Norrington stirred in his chair, which creaked again. “What are your chances?”

  A lie wouldn’t help and Charlie didn’t want to slip sideways into his theories and guesses, either. “I’d like them to be better. I’d appreciate a lot of your time.”

  Norrington shrugged. “As much as you need.” He got up. “I drink gin.”

  “Whiskey.”

  The old man returned from a separate side table with their drinks, settled noisily and said, “So?”

  “You were, what, sixteen when it happened?” Charlie spoke looking at the young Matthew gazing up at his elder brother.

  “Just seventeen, at the war’s end. Felt cheated. Was an officer cadet at Eton, all ready to go. Wanted to go even more when Simon was killed; thought it had been in action then, of course. Imagined I’d find the actual person who did it.” The man snorted humorlessly. “Some irony about that now, isn’t there?”

  “Let’s hope not,” said Charlie. “You can remember everything about the time? Not simply the death but immediately before? And afterwards?”

  “All of it.”

  Everything from the family, recalled Charlie, remembering the Berlin conversation with the military attaché. Charlie indicated the photographs of Simon Norrington on the table closest to him and said, “He was—is—obviously deeply mourned?”

  “My father was devastated. We all were, naturally. But my father took it dreadfully. The war was over, for God’s sake!”

  Charlie thought it was too much to hope, but he hoped, just the same. “How did you learn?”

  The older man frowned. “Letter. Official notification. June third.”

  That was encouraging, thought Charlie. “There were some personal belongings returned?”

  “Arrived much later, from his unit: cigarette lighter—it matched a case my father gave Simon when he graduated—his wallet. Family ring. There was a personal letter of regret, too, of course. From his commanding officer.”

  “And then there was the notification of the burial?” coaxed Charlie.

  There was another snorted, empty laugh. “Of the wrong man.”

  “But you visited the grave?”

  “Once, with my father. He was annoyed that we hadn’t been asked about the body: that it had been already buried. We’ve got our own chapel and vault here, in the grounds. But there was a dedication service in Berlin and afterwards we decided to leave Simon … we thought it was Simon … where he was.”

  “How many times did you go?”

  “Just the once with my father, for the service. It was an official affair, for a lot of families with relatives there.”

  Charlie was immediately alert to the qualification. “Was there any sort of registration at the official ceremony?”

  “Not then.”

  “But?”

  “I went again, by myself, on the first supposed anniversary. My father was ill by then, couldn’t travel. There was some form-filling nonsense that time.”

  Charlie realized he’d drifted away from the directions in which he’d been heading but decided to finish this now. “How many other times did you go: need to fill in the visitor’s form?”

  “That was the only occasion,” said Norrington. “Father had a commemorative plaque put into the chapel. We could mourn well enough here.”

  Which almost brought him back on track, Charlie recognized. “Who else from the family, apart from you, visited the grave you thought was Simon’s?”

  “No one.” The man frowned. “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m trying to build up as complete a picture as I can,” Charlie avoided, not wanting to enter still-unexplored territory. Quickly he said, “You mourned here?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie indicated the picture-crowded tables and desk again. “You kept a lot of photographs?”

  “Yes?” There was a defensive sharpness in the questioning reply.

  “What about other things? Did you keep the notification of Simon’s death—the personal things that were returned?”

  “I told you my father was devastated. In the first two or three years it was almost a shrine. It worried me.”

  Sometimes it worked to hope against hope, Charlie decided. “Do you still have it all?”

  “Yes. Father kept everything. So I did, too.”

  Don’t rush, Charlie warned himself. It still might be another blind alley; this was going far better than he’d expected and there still might be more Norrington could help with. And there were the names from Berlin. “Later, when we’ve talked some more, could I see it all?”

  Norrington hesitated. “Could it help you find the people you’re looking for?”

  “It’s my best chance so far,” replied Charlie, honestly.

  “Some of the letters are personal.”

  “Letters!”

  “I told you, Father kept a lot of stuff. Letters that Simon wrote when he got posted abroad. And before.”

  Now it was Charlie who hesitated, and when he spoke he did so slowly, not wanting to lose the chance. “Sir Matthew, I have what could be leads to whoever murdered your brother. But I don’t know how to follow them. How, in fact, to take this investigation very much further. What you have, of your brother’s, might show me.”

  “Then you must see it all,” agreed Norrington, at once. “Now?”

  “Let’s talk a little more,” said Charlie. There had to be something in what was promised: by the sheer law of averages and the way his luck was running, there had to be something that took him forward! Which made waiting a minute—a second!—close to impossibly difficult, but he kept to the determination not to hurry. Get it all, he reminded himself: an inch at a time, a step at a time.

  “What else can I tell you?” questioned the baronet. He got up to go to the drinks tray.

  Charlie shook his head against the gestured invitation. “It was big jump, wasn’t it, from Free French liaison at the War Office to a special art-looting unit?”

  Norrington frowned on his way back to his chair. “You don’t know anything at all about Simon, do you?”

  He didn’t and it made this encounter too long overdue, Charlie conceded, although refusing completely to blame his personal situation in Moscow. There had been reason enough to remain there as long as he had. “The Ministry of Defense can’t find any records about your brother.”

  Norrington’s smile was slow, an expression of belated understanding. “He didn’t tell me that.”

  It came close to Charlie’s breath being taken away by a deluge of fittingly iced water. “Who didn’t tell you what, sir?”

  Norrington got up again, went to his desk and took the small rectangle of pasteboard from a top drawer. “Burbage, Lionel Burbage. Defense Ministry. Said there was a confusion about the records, which was why he wanted what I had.”

  The iced-water feeling stayed with Charlie. “Did he take them?”

  “Asked to, but I wouldn’t let him, like I’m not going to let you. Allowed him to read them, as you can. That’s all.”

  Charlie began to feel warm again, not just at the reassurance but at his determination not to hurry. “When was this?”

&nb
sp; “Four days ago.”

  He’d met Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Jackson, the military attaché, in Berlin five days ago. It fit the urgency of the Ministry of Defense panic. “Did you make your brother’s letter available to him?”

  “Didn’t come into the conversation. He asked specifically about the official War Office communications and that’s all he saw. That’s why I asked you when you got here if you were in charge of the investigation, although Sir Rupert had already told me you were when he telephoned.”

  “What did Burbage tell you?”

  “That he was.”

  “I am,” insisted Charlie. “It’s been a problem from the beginning, too many departments, getting in each other’s way.”

  Norrington nodded in further understanding. “Burbage asked me to tell him if anyone else approached me about Simon.”

  “Did you tell him I was coming?”

  Norrington shook his head. “I didn’t know you were, then. Decided to wait. See you first. Hear what you had to say.”

  “I certainly don’t know of him. But it makes sense to stop this duplication. Which I will. Can I have Burbage’s number?”

  Norrington carried the card back with the whiskey decanter, adding unasked to Charlie’s glass. All that was listed was the name and a telephone number. No ministry was identified. Neither was any department. Norrington said, “You haven’t told me what you’ve got to say, Mr. Muffin. Not properly. Not why, for instance, Sir Rupert asked me when we originally spoke to keep secret the discovery of my brother’s body in some place I’d never heard of, nor make any public announcement about finally burying him as he should be buried, after all these years. I think I’ve been remarkably patient, but now that patience has gone.”

  Shit, thought Charlie. Shit! Shit! Shit! Family pride, he told himself desperately: family pride and honor. “Your brother was officially in Berlin; his death there was accepted. His being in Yakutsk is considered, even now, something that shouldn’t be made public. Until we find out why and how he came to be there—to be one of at least four victims in a planned killing—it’s still considered a potential national problem.”

  “That’s very difficult for me to accept. Or understand.”

  “It’s even more difficult for me to ask you to accept or understand,” pleaded Charlie. “Which is why I’m asking you for all the help I can get.”

  “My brother would not, under any circumstances, have done anything wrong: illegal or unofficial! He was proud to be an officer. To serve his country.”

  An opening, Charlie recognized. “He couldn’t have been where he was unofficially. He was obeying an order. Which was what I told you when we first began talking: what I’m trying to do is find out who gave that order. Which it would seem the Ministry of Defense is also trying to find out.” If Burbage was from the Ministry of Defense, which Charlie now doubted.

  “According to the newspapers, the Americans consider their officer to have been a hero. There’s a hero’s burial planned. Why hasn’t the same been said—planned—about Simon? And why was I asked to say nothing, do nothing, about burying him?”

  “The American is being buried as an unknown victim,” seized Charlie. “Your brother won’t be, after I’ve found out the truth. Then, maybe, he’ll be accorded the honor he’s due.”

  “No,” agreed Norrington, quietly. “Simon won’t be buried as an unknown. And I don’t want any maybes about his being accorded every honor to which he’s entitled. I’m not given to threats, Mr. Muffin—the need to prove myself. So what I am going to say isn’t a threat. It’s a statement of fact. I am not without official influence—access to private as well as public platforms. I am prepared totally and fully to cooperate with you in every way I am asked. But with a time limit. Unless I am convinced otherwise—and you must understand I will take a very great deal of convincing—I will announce two weeks from today that it was Simon’s body in the Yakutsk grave. I will disclose that somebody else was killed to fill a grave in his name in Berlin. And I shall demand a public inquiry into the circumstances of both deaths, and although it will offend me deeply I shall turn my brother’s burial here into a media event. I don’t, of course, expect you to be the messenger. I’ll telephone Sir Rupert to tell him myself. Do you think what I’ve said is unreasonable?”

  Charlie said, “I think you’ve already shown a great deal of patience and I’m grateful for another two weeks. In your position I’d have probably kept it to one.”

  Norrington’s smile was abrupt and open. “Interesting reply. When I said roughly the same to Burbage, he said he’d stop me doing anything under the Official Secrets Act, and when I told him I wasn’t a signatory to it, he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about and that it didn’t matter whether I’d signed it or not. That’s the real reason I didn’t call him when I agreed to your coming. Didn’t like the fellow. Very rude.”

  But far more important, very stupidly indiscreet, bullying like that. Suddenly reminded of Richard Cartright, Charlie decided the standard was definitely going down.

  Charlie refused the offer of lunch from Norrington’s willowy blond fourth wife who said to call her Davinia and whom he guessed to be half the baronet’s age. Instead he accepted rare beef sandwiches he didn’t get around to eating at the borrowed library desk, working steadily through the two wooden boxes of personal effects under the frozen, smiling gaze from three pictures of the man whose mysteries he was trying to solve.

  He did so careful to retain the exact order in which each item had been kept, not removing one until that which preceded it had been replaced. The crocodile wallet was an early disappointment. It contained Simon Norrington’s English driving license and visiting cards in his own name—both necessary and easy identification, Charlie acknowledged—but no one else’s cards, letters, photographs or anything connecting him to Berlin or his unit. His army pay book was endorsed for his pay to be credited automatically to a Coutts Bank account on the Strand and although he didn’t expect it to lead to the long-lost army records Charlie made a note of the pay book number. Charlie looked over it all, laid out on the desk in front of him, every item perfectly preserved, intact and undamaged, despite its age. How, he asked himself, could it have been accepted, apparently without a single question? Carried as it would have been, in the breast or inside pockets of the uniform, it should—and would—have all been totally destroyed by the massive force of whatever had killed the substitute Berlin victim.

  The official notification of Simon Norrington’s death was as cold as the grave in which the man had lain for fifty years, a formal printed notice with the choice of striking out sir or madam, whichever was inappropriate, and gaps in the text for the details of names, relationship and date of death to be inserted by hand.

  Charlie got the first of what he considered important information from the handwritten letter of condolence to the father from Norrington’s commanding officer, a colonel who signed himself John Parnell, and which was dated July 2. After the predictable eulogy of Norrington’s bravery and dedication to duty, it read:

  I cannot, of course, disclose the nature of Simon’s very special work in these most recent months but I can say he was the only person in the unit with the very necessary qualifications to carry it out. Neither can I give any precise details of how or when he died, although of course we have made strenuous efforts to discover both. His body was returned to us from a Russian-occupied part of the city. The Russian documentation merely indicates that he was found dead, by Russian troops, on or around May 10. You will be aware that at that time there was still sporadic fighting in Berlin, an indication of the bravery of your noncombatant son to which I have already referred.

  So much and yet so little, agonized Charlie, easing briefly back into the bucket chair, which creaked like all the other leather furniture. What was the work so very special that only the noncombatant Lieutenant Simon Norrington was able to undertake it in the Russian sector of Berlin in which there was still fighting? But who hadn’t
been there at all but thousands of miles away?

  There were thirty-two letters, all still in their envelopes and all in dated sequence, which was how Charlie read them, searching for people with whom Norrington had worked, particularly for references to the names he’d gotten from the Berlin photograph. A Jessica appeared in the third letter, addressed from London when Norrington was clearly still attached to the War Office, and by the fourth it was obvious she was employed there with him. From the way the next was written, she’d spent a weekend at Kingsclere. Norrington had been glad his father liked her as much as he did, but she disappeared from the correspondence just before Norrington’s transfer to the art-loss unit. Norrington was relieved at the transfer: Bloody French go on all the time as if I was personally responsible for Dunkirk and seem to forget we got almost as many of their soldiers out as we did our own.

  There wasn’t another name until Charlie was halfway through, and then it was clearly a nickname, Scotty. Norrington described him as a good man, salt of the earth. But hard. There were frequent references after that, but none of them hinted at particular friendship, more admiration. Then there was someone identified only as J, and as more single initials followed, Charlie guessed, disappointed, at Norrington’s own effort to obey wartime censorship rules. J was a tyrant, but fair, who knows his art. HH was a bully who’d clearly made an early choice about being a criminal himself and decided to step the other way over the line. And then there was the appearance of G, at which Charlie felt the tingle of recognition as he read. The letter was dated February 9, 1945. G was brilliant: I sit at his feet. G saw telltale brush detail—despite his problem—which Norrington missed: three fakes, in one day. It’s good to know the Nazis were cheated but it would have been even better if we thought they’d paid good money instead of stealing them.

  By March they were a two-man team with the highest identification rate in the combined group. It was exhilarating to be so immediately close to it all. But the scale of the pillaging is indescribable: so much lost that will never be recovered.