by Simon Toyne
‘He’s police,’ LeVay said nodding at the man on the ground. ‘Get him to hospital fast.’ He moved away from the medics and pulled his phone from his pocket.
One down and two dead. It was a mess and he felt angry that it had come to his town. He had come straight from a car wreck on the main road with no sign of anyone involved. Things like this did not usually happen in Mulhouse. He looked at the burning house. He knew who lived here and felt no love for the Englishman, raking up history that he would sooner the town forgot, but he wouldn’t have wished this kind of end for him if he turned out to be one of the bodies inside the house. Or maybe he wasn’t dead. Someone had written the note. Maybe one of the people mentioned in the private text he had received earlier that evening. He opened it now and dialled the number included with the message. It rang twice before someone picked up.
‘You have news?’ The voice sounded old and dry and LeVay felt a swell of pride as he realized it was the Leader himself he was speaking to.
‘Those people you’re looking for,’ he said. ‘They’re here.’
108
Marie-Claude woke slowly.
She could smell dust and mould, like old clothes, and her body felt numb and cold. She tried to open her eyes but her eyelids were too heavy. Every part of her felt heavy. She tried to remember where she was and a single thought surfaced along with screaming fear.
Léo. She had to save Léo.
She forced her eyes to open, grunting with the effort of it. Her eyelids flickered and the world appeared, murky and skewed. She was still in Hamilton’s car. The door next to her was open and they were parked inside a hangar of some kind. Weak light threw shadows across a rough brick wall and a large industrial machine made from cast iron. She braced herself for another mighty effort and managed to turn her head a little. Léo was on the seat next to her, his face turned away. She couldn’t see if he was awake or not. He seemed so still and she tried to move closer, but if opening her eyes had been hard this was impossible. It felt like her body was disconnected from her mind. Something shifted in the light and she looked across, as far as her eyes would reach, and saw Hamilton hunched over a series of buttons set into the side of the great machine. He was lit by the glow of a laptop displaying a detail of Solomon’s waistcoat. A large ledger lay open next to it revealing different striped patterns as Hamilton turned the pages. The machine had to be the loom the prisoners had dubbed the Golem, and Hamilton was deciphering the list of Die Anderen, looking for the last name.
She looked back at Léo and focused all her energy on trying to move her right arm. Her fingers moved slightly as the feeling slowly returned and she started to sweat despite the cold. Then the light changed and she looked across to find Hamilton standing by the car. He wore a black scarf around his face and a black hat on his head, leaving only his eyes visible. He was staring right at her.
‘It was you,’ she said, her voice sounding muddy, her tongue feeling too large in her mouth. ‘You killed my grandfather. Why?’
Hamilton held up a notebook. ‘I need you to translate these names for me,’ he said. His voice sounded strange, like someone else was speaking through him.
She looked at the Hebrew letters and names began to form as her brain automatically translated. She looked away again. ‘I’m not helping you. Why would I help you?’
‘Because the amount of Propofol I gave your son was probably too much for his size. I’m used to dealing with adults, you see, and I had to improvise. Which means he’ll probably die unless he gets a save shot.’ He held up a syringe loaded with clear liquid. ‘Translate the names and I’ll give it to him.’
‘Give him the shot, then I’ll translate.’
Hamilton shook his head. ‘That’s not how it works. Please understand, I do not need you to translate. I could easily figure these names out for myself using the internet. I want you to translate it because I want you to understand. You wish to learn your family history? Translate these names and you will. Your grandfather should have died in this place. He was a mistake of history. My mistake. Translate the names and you will understand.’
Marie-Claude looked back at the notebook and spotted her grandfather’s name among the Hebrew letters. She frowned as she read further. ‘There are more than four names here,’ she said. ‘It looks like there are … eight.’
Hamilton nodded. ‘Eight names, but only four people. Give me the last name, the last of the Jewish names.’
Marie-Claude scanned the letters and spotted a name that was familiar to her, not only from her research but also from the fashion magazines her grandfather had always subscribed to. ‘Max Hoffmann,’ she said, her eyes returning to Hamilton. ‘The Max Hoffman?’
Hamilton let out a deep sigh. ‘Hoffmann,’ he repeated. ‘There have always been rumours of how he started his fashion empire after the war, but nothing was ever proved. It seems money and success buy protection. Not any more, though. Not now I have proof of who he really is.’
Marie-Claude looked at the names, one German name for each of The Others. Max Hoffmann was a legend in the fashion industry. She’d had no idea her grandfather had even known him, let alone survived this place with him. She hadn’t known they were the same age, though Hoffman had had so much plastic surgery it was hard to tell how old he was. ‘The shot,’ she said. ‘Give Léo the shot. You promised.’
‘I did,’ Hamilton said, moving over to the workbench and picking up the laptop. ‘I promised I would help you understand.’ He moved back to the car and placed the laptop on the seat beside her, where she could see it. ‘And now you shall.’
Marie-Claude looked at the screen and saw her grandfather’s bruised and bloody face staring back at her. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘give Léo the shot.’ She could feel movement returning to her arms and legs but not nearly fast enough.
‘I didn’t get his full confession,’ Hamilton said. ‘Not like Saul Schwartzfeldt. But he said enough for you to understand.’
‘I already understand,’ Marie-Claude said, tears of anger and frustration dripping from her eyes. ‘I know who you are. You’re Günther Samler. Artur Samler’s son.’
Hamilton shook his head. ‘No. Günther Samler did survive the war, but after Herman Lansky vowed in his memoir never to give up looking for him, Samler tracked him down in order to silence him. He showed up at Lansky’s flat with a gun, mocking his efforts to find Die Anderen and taunting him with the truth of who they were. But Lansky was prepared. Fearing someone from his past might come for him, he always carried a knife. There was a struggle. A fire started. Lansky was shot and wounded, but Günther was fatally stabbed. It was Günther Samler they found in the burned flat, not Herman Lansky. I lived in the next street to him, I was the one who’d found the flat for him when he first came to London. So he came to me, bleeding heavily from his wounds. He told me everything before he died, about Samler, about Die Anderen. He didn’t know their new identities or where they’d gone after the war, but he knew what they were and he shared the truth with me. Before he died he asked me to find them all and make sure justice was carried out. He also made me promise to keep the real details of his death a secret so that Die Anderen, wherever they were, would think he’d died before talking to anyone and would therefore feel safe from his investigations. I did what he asked and buried him in a bomb site in the East End of London, another nameless victim of the war, and started my search for The Others.
‘For decades I searched and found nothing but rumours and dead ends. Then you contacted me and told me your grandfather was one of them. I helped you, of course, hoping your family connection might flush them out from hiding. I hoped you might find them all before I exacted justice, but fate dealt me a death sentence of my own.’ Hamilton tapped the side of his head. ‘Brain tumour. Inoperable. No time left. I had to try and speed things up. That’s why I needed confessions. Your grandfather was not Josef Engel. I’ll let him tell you who he really was.’
He tapped the space bar and the clip started to play. Marie-Claude
tried to concentrate, but her mind was screaming from what she had been told and because Léo still hadn’t been given the antidote to the anaesthetic shutting his little body down.
My given name is Josef Engel …
Her grandfather’s voice was slurred like hers, but his eyes were sharp and full of sorrow.
… My real name is Fritz Heissel. I achieved the rank of SS-Oberschütze in the third division of the Army of the German Reich. I was a guard in the Arbeit Lager designated as Mulhouse A, also known as Die Schneider Lager … This is my confession …
‘A mistake of history,’ Hamilton whispered, stepping forward and plunging the hypodermic needle into her arm instead of Léo’s. ‘The progeny of evil. You should never have been born, but now I can put that right. Your grandfather never wanted to talk about the war, did he, about his time in the camps? You thought it was because the memories were too painful, but in truth it was because he wasn’t a Jewish prisoner. He was a German guard. He cheated death by putting on prisoner’s clothes and caving a cellar in on top of himself to ensure he wouldn’t be found until he was starved enough to pass for the skeletons he had been guarding.’
Marie-Claude’s vision swam and her eyes began to close. She could feel the drug spreading through her like a chill, dragging her down into the dark. The door closed and she heard the engine start and felt the car move, out of the factory and into the night. ‘You will be with your son soon enough,’ Hamilton murmured in the voice that didn’t sound like his. ‘Your son and your grandfather both.’
109
The gates to the camp were wide open and Solomon felt an ominous sense of déjà-vu as he ran through them. He had been here before, he was certain of it, and he was anxious and afraid of what he might remember. For there was nothing good here, he knew that much, only pain. The air felt thicker inside the fence, and cold, like the ghosts of the place were crowding round him. Solomon pushed on through the cold, legs burning and lungs bursting from the sprint from Hamilton’s house, heading towards a dim light shining through an open door in one of the loom sheds. He slowed as he approached it, listening as best he could through his laboured breathing for signs of anyone inside.
He reached the door and peered in. The huge loom stood silent and impressive, no sign of anyone around except for a large ledger of pattern samples lying open next to the control panel. Solomon walked over and flicked through the pages, studying the patterns, his photographic memory matching some to the pattern of his waistcoat. He could smell exhaust fumes in the shed and something subtle and sweet and chemical; he followed the smells back outside and over to the far side of the camp where a car was parked next to a large pile of rubble. The engine was warm beneath the bonnet but there was no one inside. Solomon could hear something now, so low it kept getting rubbed out by the gusting night breeze. It sounded like the voice of an old man and he wondered if it was one of the ghosts that thickened the air, whispering something to him from the cold, dark past. But he knew this place, knew where he was standing and in the fugue of half-memory and familiarity he looked at the pile of rubble and realized where the voice must be coming from. Solomon moved across the ground, following the shifting voice until he found the entrance to the cellar. It had only been partially cleared and he picked his way down rubble-strewn steps, the voice growing louder as he sank into the dark earth:
… he told us he could save us if we gave him our names … Der bleiche Mann …
Solomon reached the bottom of the steps and saw a pale light flickering at the end of a short corridor. He moved towards it, feeling his way along the rough wall and listening to the old man’s voice as he went:
… he told us to write down our names, our old ones and the ones he gave us, and told us we had to keep them in plain sight …
Solomon reached the end of the corridor and looked round the corner and into the cellar. Plastic sacks of rubble were stacked by a broken doorway alongside a pile of pickaxes and shovels. The light was coming from a laptop, a video clip playing on the screen showing the bloody face of Josef Engel. Three bodies lay on the ground in front of it – Marie-Claude, Léo and Hamilton – arranged like corpses in a crypt. Solomon hurried over, dropped the Magellan file on the floor and checked each for a pulse as Josef Engel continued his sorrowful confession.
… it was Max’s idea to use the Golem to record our names. We made a suit for the pale man and wove the names into the lining – in plain sight but also hidden, like he said it must be. The other list, the one we all had to sign, we took with us into the cellar …
Solomon hit the space bar to stop the clip. He needed to concentrate, and the old man’s story was too distracting. He could listen to it later, when everyone was safe.
‘Marie-Claude,’ he said, lightly slapping her cheek. ‘Come back to me.’
He rolled an eyelid back with his thumb and her pupil reacted to light but she remained unconscious. He checked her airway, rolled her on to her side, then moved over to Léo. He pressed a finger to his neck and it took him a few moments to find a pulse. It was slow and dangerously weak. He leaned in close and sniffed him, picking up scraps of the day’s accumulated odours – from the car, from Hamilton’s house, from the cellar floor. There was also the same sweet chemical smell that Solomon had caught in the loom shed, something heady and organic. An opiate. He rolled Léo’s eyelid back but his pupil barely responded to the light. He was sinking too fast, dragged down by the drug he’d been given.
Information roared in Solomon’s brain about opiate overdoses and how to treat them. There were drugs to combat it, but he had none of them. Léo needed emergency care fast and he needed to be prevented from sinking any deeper into his chemical sleep.
‘Léo!’ Solomon shouted, slapping him hard across the face. He picked him up, threw him over his shoulder and ran from the cellar, jostling him violently as he headed back to the loom shed. He lay Léo down on the cold, hard floor, put him on his side in the recovery position, and looked over at the huge beast of a machine. He needed to make as much noise as he could to keep Léo’s senses active and his mind guided him to a large throw switch beneath the control panel. He pulled it up and the Golem clattered noisily to life, shaking the ground and walls of the factory as it built up speed and the shuttle flew back and forth across the loom. Solomon looked around and saw a phone by the entrance and his mind plucked the local emergency number from deep in his memory as he ran to it.
‘State your emergency.’
‘I need an ambulance immediately,’ Solomon shouted above the din of the machine. ‘Address is Rue de la Reine, Mulhouse.’
‘Die Schneider Lager?’
‘Yes. I have a woman, a child and an elderly man in induced opiate coma. The man and the woman’s vital signs are steady, but the boy’s are weak. He is seven or eight years old. Tell the ambulance to prepare for an immediate Lipid Resuscitation and possible adrenaline shot on arrival. He’s in the main factory building, the only one with a light on. The gates are open. Tell them to hurry.’
He hung up, ran from the building and scooped cold rainwater into his hands from a puddle in the yard. He ran back inside and flung the water into Léo’s face, then turned and ran back to the cellar because there was nothing else he could do for him.
Josef Engel’s frozen image illuminated the cellar, his bloodied face staring out at the place where he had nearly died. Solomon leaned over Hamilton first. He was the eldest and weakest, and therefore the most likely to crash from the overdose. The sickly smell of opiates seemed stronger on him and came with a vague undercurrent of honey. Solomon thumbed back Hamilton’s eyelid and his pupil reacted normally.
‘Monsieur,’ Solomon said, slapping his face a little.
He felt the hand flying out of the darkness more than saw it, a shift in pressure, a creak of tensing muscle. Solomon twisted away, caught the hand and diverted the stabbing needle it held into Hamilton’s chest, banging his fist on the end of the syringe to empty it. Hamilton gasped as the opiates flooded
into him.
‘It’s you,’ Hamilton said, his voice already slurring as he began to slip under. ‘Der bleiche Mann, the pale man. I thought you were a story. They all said you would come back. And you did.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ Solomon said. ‘You saved these people once. Why kill them now? Why kill the woman and the boy?’
‘Evil must meet justice.’
Solomon shook his head. ‘The woman and her boy are not evil.’
Hamilton glanced at Engel’s image on the screen. ‘But they came from evil.’
Solomon thought of the long hours he’d spent with Marie-Claude and Léo. He thought of the gentle love and compassion they’d shared and the selflessness they’d displayed in seeking to travel so far to warn an old man of the danger he was in. ‘Good can come from evil,’ he said, and he looked down at Hamilton with a mixture of pity and disgust. ‘Just as evil can come from good.’
Pain and hate twisted Hamilton’s features. He tried to get up but the drugs had hold of him now. His eyes rolled up into his skull and he fell back down to the dusty floor, banging his head hard on the flagstone floor.
Solomon searched him quickly, looking for an antidote to the opiates but finding nothing. He pulled the almost empty syringe from Hamilton’s chest and slipped it into his pocket. Outside, he could hear the sound of a siren getting louder above the rumble of the loom. He should go and meet them, direct them to Léo and Marie-Claude, but they were still a few minutes away and he had business here, he could feel it. Hamilton had called him the pale man, as Otto had done earlier. But he couldn’t be him. It wasn’t possible.
He hit the space bar on the laptop to restart the clip and Josef Engel’s voice murmured in the room:
… the pale man told us to strip off our uniforms and throw them with our identity cards on to the fire. He gave us prisoners’ uniforms to wear but they were new, not soiled and filthy like the ones we were used to seeing. The pale man smiled and said we would look right by the time we were found. Then he led us to one of the outbuildings, a storage hut with a concrete cellar beneath it …