by Simon Toyne
Solomon looked around the room, something like memory leading his eye to a spot in the far corner where the rubble had yet to be cleared. He felt like he had been here before but he couldn’t have been, he couldn’t be the pale man, and yet the story Josef Engel was telling seemed familiar – like he could almost remember it, like he knew what he would describe next. Shifting the laptop so the glow from the screen lit the rubble on the far wall, he grabbed a shovel from the pile and started to clear it.
… there were thirty-four of us in that cellar, but only four of us gave the pale man our names. I was young and scared and didn’t want to die so I gave him mine. He told us to write them on a sheet of paper and bury it at the site of our rebirth in an envelope he gave us with something heavy inside. I didn’t see what it was because Max sealed the letter. The pale man locked us inside the cellar and told us to wait …
The shovel caught something on the floor and Solomon dropped down and brushed dust away from a square slab set into the floor. He ran his finger round the edge of it and thumped it with his fist and heard a slight hollowness beneath.
… some of us panicked a little when the door was locked. It was like we had been in a trance and the bang of the door snapped us out of it. Within moments the ground shook with explosions and we heard masonry fall against the door and we knew we were trapped. That’s when the panic really took hold …
Solomon grabbed a pickaxe from the pile, drove the point into the gap and leaned back to lever up the slab. Beneath it was an old tin with a picture of sewing needles on a rusted lid.
… If we’d known how long we would be in that cellar and how bad it would get, I think maybe we would have ended it then and there. I was scared of dying and have lived a long life since, but it has come at a great cost. It has been a life of hiding. A lie …
Solomon picked up the tin and prised it open. Inside was an envelope. He picked it up and felt the air thicken around him, as if ghosts were crowding around to see what was inside. There was something heavy and thin in there, and Solomon wanted to see what it was but was also afraid of it. He was connected to what had happened here. Maybe even responsible. He didn’t understand how, but he felt it, he remembered it, and it made him feel wretched and sick. There was so much pain in this place, chilling the air and sinking it into deep shadow with a darkness more than night. And some of that pain was his. He had history here and he was afraid to learn it.
… I often wish I had never gone into that cellar or given the pale man my name. But when I look at my granddaughter and her son, I think that maybe it was worth the price after all, if only to see what shining good can grow from the darkest of places …
Outside, the wail of the siren cut out, telling him that the medics had arrived. He had information that might help them. Solomon scooped up the Magellan file from where he’d dropped it and slipped the envelope inside. He hauled Marie-Claude over his shoulder and picked up the laptop, shutting off Josef Engel’s voice as he closed it. Finally he walked out of the cellar leaving Hamilton alone in the dark with the disappointed ghosts.
110
Blue lights from an ambulance and two police cars flickered in the night, lighting the dark buildings of the camp and the uniformed medics hurrying into the loom shed with their emergency equipment.
‘Another one here,’ Solomon shouted above the din of the loom.
One of the medics looked over and ran to help. Solomon carried Marie-Claude straight into the ambulance and lay her on a stretcher, tucking the laptop beneath her.
‘They’ve been overdosed with this –’ He took the syringe from his pocket and handed it to the medic. ‘It’s very fast-acting. Paralytic and narcotic. Something like Propofol.’ He held his hand to the side of Marie-Claude’s face, still beautiful despite the cuts and bruises, then turned as Léo was carried into the ambulance. ‘Do you carry Naloxone or Naltrexone?’ The medic nodded. ‘Give him some. His vitals are dangerously low. His name’s Léo.’ He looked back at Marie-Claude. ‘She’s Marie-Claude, his mother. Her signs are fine. There’s another one in a cellar over there. He’s pretty old and will probably need the Naloxone too. I’ll show you where he is.’
Solomon took one step out of the ambulance and stopped when he saw the gun pointing right at him. ‘Hands where we can see them,’ the gendarme holding it said.
Solomon raised his hands, still holding the Magellan file.
‘What’s your name?’ the gendarme asked.
‘Solomon Creed.’
‘Well now, Monsieur Creed, consider yourself under arrest on suspicion of murder.’
‘The man you want is over there,’ Solomon said, nodding in the direction of the piles of rubble and Hamilton’s parked car. ‘His name is John Hamilton.’
‘John Hamilton, whose house is currently on fire?’
‘Yes. I would imagine he probably did that too. The woman in the ambulance can confirm it all when she wakes up. So can the police officer you will have found unconscious on Hamilton’s drive.’
‘That man is in a critical condition in hospital. Heart attack. And until we can talk to someone who is actually conscious, I’m going to lock you up.’ Another gendarme stepped forward with a set of handcuffs in his hand and two more stood behind him, their hands resting on their sidearms.
Solomon was cuffed and bundled into the back of one of the police cars. ‘Stay with him, Thierry,’ the man in charge said. ‘The rest of you, follow me.’
LeVay headed across the courtyard towards the parked car, flashlights needling the dark and picking out the jagged edges of broken masonry. He hated this place, not only because it gave him the creeps but because it was a constant and unwelcome reminder of the past. When the party got into power and France was free again he hoped they would bulldoze the place and finally unchain his town from the anchor of what had happened here. His interest was in France’s future success, not its failed past.
They found the steps to the cellar and he led the way, searching ahead with his torch. They found Hamilton near a pile of recently disturbed rubble. While the medics went to work on him, LeVay moved over to a hole in the ground and nudged the empty tin lying next to it with his foot. The leadership had told him to look for some kind of list. The empty tin suggested that maybe Solomon had found it. He remembered the file he had been holding in his hand. It was in the car now. And so was he.
The medics finished their checks and loaded Hamilton on to a stretcher. LeVay followed them out, glad to be back in the air and out of the cellar. He knew all the stories about the camp, including the one about the four survivors they’d found. If they bulldozed the place, those stories would fade away and everyone would be better off. He followed the medics back to the ambulance and the night fell silent as someone finally shut off the loom.
‘Over here, Chief,’ a voice called out.
LeVay walked to the ambulance and found the woman semi-awake and propped up on the stretcher. ‘Léo,’ she murmured.
‘He’s safe, madame,’ LeVay said. ‘They’re treating him now. Can you tell me what happened here?’
‘Hamilton,’ she replied. ‘He injected us with something. He murdered my grandfather.’
‘And how is Solomon Creed involved?’ LeVay asked.
She frowned. ‘He saved us.’
LeVay nodded. ‘Let’s talk when you’re more rested.’
He stepped out of the ambulance and lit a cigarette. He wouldn’t be able to hold Solomon for long with the woman vouching for him. But it was the list the leadership seemed most interested in and he could give them that. He took a long pull on his cigarette, filling his lungs with smoke and night air as he walked over to the police car. He could see Thierry sitting behind the wheel, facing front. He couldn’t see Solomon. He reached the car and stared into the empty back seat. ‘Where is he?’ he hollered, throwing his cigarette to the ground.
Thierry blinked and looked up at him. ‘Where’s who?’
‘The prisoner? Where’s the prisoner?’ Thierry
continued to look blank. LeVay turned and scanned the dark compound, looking for signs of movement. ‘Come on, he can’t have gone far. You lost him, you can help me get him back.’ He pulled his gun and moved away from the car but stopped when he realized Thierry wasn’t following. He turned back and glared at his sergeant, still sitting in the car and frowning at the steering wheel. ‘Get out of the fucking car and help me look for him!’ LeVay hollered.
Thierry continued to frown at his hands. ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘It’s my hands. My hands are stuck to the steering wheel.’
111
‘Léo!!’ Marie-Claude woke with a start, wrapped in the smell of hospitals.
She’d been dreaming of home, walking through Cordes and looking for Léo, running down darkening streets and calling his name.
‘Mama?’
She turned her head and there he was, lying in the next bed with tubes in his arm. He looked so tiny.
‘Léo.’
‘I’m OK, Mama.’
She smiled at him and wanted to go over to his bed and get in and squeeze him until he clicked, but she had tubes in her arms too and a clip on her finger monitoring her heartbeat, so she stayed where she was.
She looked around the white room, trying to remember how she got there and recalling hazy fragments of Baptiste and Hamilton and a video clip of her bloodied grandfather playing on a laptop. The laptop was on a chair next to her, lying among a pile of her clothes. She wondered how it had got there and how long she had been out. She looked over at the window. It was still dark outside.
‘Where’s Monsieur Creed?’ she asked.
‘The doctor said a man called the ambulance and told them where we were and what to do to make us better. He said if he hadn’t called, I’d most likely be dead.’
‘Léo, a doctor would never have said that to you.’
‘OK, he didn’t say it exactly, but his colours were all dark and serious while he was talking, and I could tell that’s what he meant. It was Monsieur Creed, wasn’t it, the man who called the ambulance?’
‘I think so, yes.’
Léo smiled and fell silent for a moment. ‘Where do you suppose he’s gone?’
‘I don’t know, chéri.’
‘Do you think he’ll come and see us?’
Marie-Claude shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think he will. I think he came to help us and he did – and now he’s gone.’
‘You think maybe he’s gone to help someone else now, like superheroes do?’
Marie-Claude smiled and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like a superhero. Monsieur Creed is exactly like a superhero.’
The door opened and a doctor came in with two policemen behind him.
‘You’re awake,’ the doctor said, checking her pulse. ‘How are you feeling?’
Marie-Claude glanced at the gendarmes. ‘Tired.’
‘We wondered if we could talk to you,’ the older of the two gendarmes said. ‘About what happened to you tonight.’
Marie-Claude nodded. ‘Of course. But could you maybe give me a few more minutes to wake up, I’m not sure I’m thinking straight yet.’
The gendarme nodded, glanced at the laptop. ‘Of course. Shall we come back in, say, half an hour?’
Marie-Claude smiled. ‘Thank you. And could I have some water, please, my mouth feels like it’s got cotton wool in it.’
The gendarmes left and the doctor poured water from a jug and shone a light into her eyes to check her pupil response while she drank it. He did the same for Léo, wrote some figures on a chart, and left them.
As soon as he was gone Marie-Claude took the laptop and opened it. The desktop was unlocked and was filled with folders and video files. She connected to the hospital Wi-Fi network, opened her Gmail account and looked over at Léo. From the moment he was born she’d spent her life trying to do what was best for him, helping him to understand who he was and where he fit into the world and all the while protecting him. She saw now that her grandfather had done the same with her. He had always warned her away from learning the truth of what had happened in the camp and now she understood why.
But she could guard the secret, like her grandfather had done; she could protect Léo from it, as he had kept it from her. She remembered what Solomon had said to her in the car, about how he believed he was here to do exactly that, to protect Léo from the knowledge of his past. To save him from it. To be his Sin Eater. And yet, when it had come down to it, he had left the laptop behind in the full knowledge of what it contained. He had left the decision to her.
She looked over at Léo, looking tiny in his hospital bed with his big knowing eyes that saw the world in such a magical way. She had seen such strength in him through all of this, such wisdom she hadn’t known was there. He was magical, and Solomon had seen it. Magical and strong.
She opened up a new email and started filling the address field with all the contacts she could think of – people she knew from the Shoah Foundation, press contacts she had made through her research. Next she went online and started looking up names of national and international news outlets – TV, print, online, radio – adding the email addresses of editors and political columnists to her growing list.
‘What are you doing, Mama?’ Léo asked from his bed.
‘Let me finish this, Léo, and I’ll tell you.’ She went through political sites next, adding the press office contacts of all the major French political parties to her list. When she was finished, she started to upload the video of her grandfather and Saul Schwartzfeldt’s confessions to her YouTube account and wrote an email explaining everything – about Hamilton, about Die Anderen, finally getting to tell the story she had spent years chasing down. She had always believed the story needed to be told and, now she knew the truth, she believed it even more. Despite what she had learned about her grandfather and what he had been, she knew that he had also become a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather. His legacy was made up of more than whatever he had done in the war. She was his legacy, as was Léo. She finished her email and wiped a tear from her cheek as she read it through. Then she attached the links to the YouTube clips, paused one last time as she considered what she was about to do, and pressed send, checking the time anxiously as she waited for it to go, aware that the email was large and the police were due to return any minute. A whooshing sound announced that it had gone and she breathed again, closed the laptop, sat back in her bed and looked across at Léo with his huge, expectant eyes.
‘What are my colours like, Léo?’
He frowned, unused to being asked this by his mother. ‘They’re orangey-green. Normal. They were darker when you were working on the laptop, but now you’ve stopped, they’ve gone light again.’
Marie-Claude smiled. ‘I need to talk to you about something, Léo.’
He nodded. ‘Is it about Monsieur Creed?’
‘No, Léo. It’s about Grampy and the bad camp. It’s about where we come from and who we are. It’s about us.’
112
Max Hoffmann locked himself away in the bunker of his basement office, monitoring what was happening in Mulhouse through his network of spies. It was a mess: people missing, people dead – though the woman was still alive, Josef Engel’s granddaughter, the Jewish bitch who had caused all this trouble. At least she was in hospital and not in full health. People died in hospital all the time. Hamilton was already as good as dead, lying in a coma he would never recover from, according to LeVay, after a huge brain embolism had turned him into a vegetable. That was one bit of good news, at least. The madman who had been hunting them down and who had killed Saul and Josef had not managed to finish off him or Otto.
He thought of Otto now, working away at his loom, his mind almost gone. He envied him sometimes, envied the luxurious oblivion of being able to forget, the lightness of it. His burden was much heavier and he carried it alone and in secret. He had often dreamed of a time, after his party had taken power, when he could finally reveal who he was. He imagined how his story mi
ght take on the dimension of legend in a new France, the tale of a man who had carried the flame of nationalism, kept it buried deep in his heart as he built a fortune from the ruin of his life and poured all the money into rekindling that flame on a grand and proper scale. He imagined they might name cities after him as part of the restructuring of a newly energized Europe, once the misguided experiments of liberalism and socialism and democracy had failed. All he had to do was stay hidden for a few more weeks, until his party had won the seats they were predicted to win as they rode the wave of dissatisfaction and racial tension he had helped cultivate. The elections were only three weeks away. Three weeks left to wait after seventy years of waiting. Nothing could stop them now. He would make sure of it. He would wait until the police had interviewed the woman and find out what she knew from LaVey. Then he would decide what to do with her. If she had to be silenced, so be it. In the meantime, he would stay locked in his mansion surrounded by the memories of his secret life – the Nazi uniform he had worn as a guard, the striped prisoner uniform he had worn to escape justice, the political posters and campaign literature of the party he had slowly built over seventy patient years. He was safe here.
But Hoffmann’s mind kept drifting to the stranger, the man who had evaded every attempt to capture him, the one named Solomon Creed. The name meant nothing to him but his description did. He had read it now on several police reports, variations on the same distantly familiar theme – pale, tall, thin, white hair and skin. One of the reports had gone further, describing the clothes he wore as ‘… resembling an incomplete suit with jacket and waistcoat but mismatched trousers’. Hoffmann glanced over at one of the display cabinets, the soft light illuminating the mannequin inside and the pale, tailored pair of trousers with high waist and tapered legs, made to measure for someone tall and thin. It couldn’t be him, the man who had saved them in the camps, the man who had asked them to make a suit but never returned to claim it. Had he come back now, after all these years? So many years. And why save them then only to hunt them down now? It couldn’t be him. He just needed to keep his nerve. Wait it out, down here in his bunker, safe and secure, where nothing could reach him.