by Simon Toyne
The phone call that finished him came shortly after dawn. Maria, his secretary, patched it in from the upstairs office. He had told her he wasn’t taking calls, but this was from Yves DuTronc, managing editor of France Today, the most popular and right-leaning of the print dailies and a huge party supporter.
‘I just got an email,’ DuTronc said. ‘It contains documentary evidence proving that you are a Nazi fugitive who escaped justice by masquerading as a Jewish prisoner.’
Hoffmann felt his blood flash hot in his veins. ‘Delete it,’ he said.
‘The same email has been sent to the editor of every newspaper and news media outlet in France, England, Germany, America as well as to key members of the French National Assembly.’
‘We can spin it,’ Hoffmann said, his heart hammering against the thin walls of his chest. ‘Say it’s a smear. I’ll threaten to sue anyone who runs it. It’s too close to the election, we can’t let this get out.’
‘I’ve looked through the evidence and forwarded the email so you can see for yourself. It’s too compelling to ignore. I think denial will only pour petrol on the flames.’
The email pinged into Hoffman’s account. He opened it and skim-read the contents, saw his name listed alongside Josef Engel, Saul Schwartzfeldt and Otto Adelstein.
… these are the ones known as The Others, the message said.
… aside from Herman Lansky, they are the only known prisoners to survive the liquidation of Die Schneider Lager. But they were not prisoners. Two of them recorded confessions of who they really were.
Hoffman clicked on one of the video links in the mail and stared at Josef Engel’s bloodied face. He started the clip playing and listened to his old friend’s voice, slurred with sedative and pain:
My given name is Josef Engel. My real name is Fritz Heissel. I achieved the rank of SS-Oberschütze in the third division of the Army of the German Reich.
There it was, their great secret exposed and shared with the world after seventy long years of careful hiding. Hoffman’s mind flitted around in panic, looking for a way out of this. There was always a solution, he could always see a way through, but this time he came up with nothing. ‘What can we do?’ he asked DuTronc.
There was a deep sigh. ‘A large part of our energies have always been focused on distancing the party from any neo-Nazi accusations. This revelation that you, its chief architect and donor, are actually a former Nazi guard who posed as a Jewish prisoner to escape justice undermines all our credibility. It will kill us at the elections. There’s nothing we can do. It’s done. I was only calling out of courtesy, to warn you. We have no choice but to run the story. It’s too big to ignore. I’m sorry.’
Max Hoffmann put down the phone and turned to the map of France. His party was leading in the polls in over three hundred of the five hundred and seventy-seven circonscriptions. They were going to win the election, there was no question. The people of France had already decided. Even if this story did break, the people would vote for his party. The party was bigger than him now. Much bigger.
His phone rang again and he snatched it up. ‘There are police here,’ his secretary Maria said, her voice sounding stretched. ‘They’re asking for you.’
‘Tell them you don’t know where I am.’
Her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘They have a warrant to seize all documents relating to the party. All party assets have been frozen, pending a thorough investigation of its finances and practices.’
‘What?! No. They can’t. We can’t campaign with no finances! The election is only three weeks awa—’
‘Monsieur Hoffmann,’ a man’s voice cut him off. ‘We know you’re in the building. Please surrender yourself. Do not make me come and find you.’
Hoffman hung up. Panicked. His heart hammering painfully. He grabbed his Ledger – the Ledger of the Loyal – all the names of the party faithful throughout France, contacts, positions. He had to get rid of it. If they found it, they could trace his entire network and make all kinds of unwanted connections, not least in regard to the Josef Engel murder investigation. He moved over to the fireplace and began to tear out pages, throwing them into the grate until it was full. He took a match and lit the edge of one of the pages but the paper was thick and damp from being locked away in the basement and the flame smouldered then snuffed out.
A loud hammering on the door made Hoffman drop the book. They were outside. The door was thick but they might make Maria give them the code. He looked around in panic and hurried over to the drinks cabinet. The bottle of cognac clinked as his shaking hand took it from the rack. He uncorked it and sprinkled the smouldering pages with the amber liquid.
There was another bang on the door and muffled voices. Marie was out there, he could hear her talking. They would make her unlock the door. He had to be quick. He poured more cognac on the crumpled pages, struck a match and dropped it into the fireplace. There was a whoosh of blue fire as the flame caught the alcohol fumes and exploded from the grate. Hoffman closed his eyes against the wave of heat and staggered backwards. He opened his eyes and saw that the pages were burning now, but the heat was still on him. He looked down and saw blue flame on his hands and arms. He beat at them, trying to put them out, but the sleeves of his jacket were soaked in cognac.
Hoffman staggered backwards, beating at the flames in panic. But his hands were on fire now, and all he did was spread it. He hit the wall and slumped to the floor, batting at the fire that covered him with burning hands. His instinct was to call out to Maria for help, but the ledger was still half full of pages. He had to burn it. He was unimportant now. The party and its survival were all that mattered.
He pushed himself to his feet, the flames all over him like a suit of fire. Behind him, flames spread up the wall where he’d leaned, across the map of France and the posters of all the party candidates, burning away their smiles, Jean-Luc Belloq included.
The hammering on the door intensified and Max Hoffman focused on the ledger, the pain of the fire all over him now. He dropped to the floor beside the book, tried to pick it up but his burning hands wouldn’t work so he fell on the book instead, clutching it to his chest with burning arms as the door burst open and uniformed bodies surged in.
He heard Maria scream and it reminded him of a time seventy years earlier when he had stood by a burning factory, listening to similar sounds amid the smell of smoke and burning flesh. He clutched the book tighter as the photographs of party candidates behind him curled in the heat, filling the air with glowing embers and smoke.
Figures swarmed around him and Max Hoffman died wondering if they were real or ghosts, the dead come to claim him at last from the cold forgotten ashes of his past.
EPILOGUE
Solomon sat on the banks of the Rhine and watched the river flow while the sun slowly rose in a hazy sky. He’d crossed over to the German side because he needed to rest and think, and because it was nice to be in a country where the police weren’t looking for him. He could hear the sound of distant sirens on the opposite side of the river, carried on the shifting breeze, and he thought of Marie-Claude and how, by helping her resolve the mystery of her past, he had raised some dark questions about his own.
He picked up the file he’d taken from Magellan, and looked at his own picture on the cover. He wanted to know what it contained but was afraid of it too. Afraid of what he might discover. Afraid of who he might be. He shook out the envelope he’d found in the cellar and turned it over in his hand. It was blank and mottled with age and he could feel something hard and flat inside it. He slid a finger beneath the flap, tore it open and tipped a folded sheet of paper and a sliver of silvered glass into his hand. The paper was as mottled as the envelope with faint words printed on a surface that had been scoured away with sand or grit, leaving only traces of the original text behind. Solomon studied what remained, translating the dry German in his head. It detailed the process of prisoner selection and appeared to have been torn from some kind of prison manual. But wha
t had been printed on the page was unimportant, it was what was written on it now that made Solomon’s mouth go dry. It was a contract, written in the same dark brown ink he had seen on a similar document in Arizona. The wording was familiar too:
We the undersigned pledge our sacred and immortal souls in exchange for liberty from this place and a long life thereafter.
Signed,
Manfred Schiller (Max Hoffman)
Fritz Heissel (Josef Engel)
Wolfgang Lutz (Otto Adelstein)
Karl Schmidt (Saul Schwartzfeldt)
Solomon stared at the words and the names written in blood.
In his memoir, Herman Lansky had described a pale man arriving at the camp on the day it was liquidated. Josef Engel had talked of him too, said he’d asked for their names:
… our old ones and the ones he gave us …
Solomon looked at the torn page and the names recorded on it. Had he told them to do this? Had he taken their souls in exchange for their salvation? The camp had seemed so familiar to him – and yet he can’t have been the man they all remembered. It was impossible.
It’s you, Hamilton had told him, der bleiche Mann, the pale man. They all said you would come back. And you did.
Otto Adelstein had said it too. He had been afraid of Solomon. But Léo had not. The boy had seen something else in him. Something good. He said that he shone, like a child shone, like something pure and innocent. Was he really the pale man? Had he been somehow reborn? Rebirth, transmigration, reincarnation – it was known by many names in many different cultures, but the idea was always the same: one soul living many lives, gradually perfecting an existence and making restitution for past mistakes to ultimately move on to another plane. Was that what this was? Was he revisiting his own past and putting right what another version of himself had once made wrong?
He opened the file he had taken from Magellan and scanned the documents inside – police reports summarizing what had happened in Arizona and a variety of psychological studies. They were drawn from two different facilities but were for the same patient – James John Huffam Hawdon.
Solomon said the name out loud, tasting it on his tongue. It was familiar. Sweet. Was this him?
He started to read, turning the pages so fast he tore them as he soaked up the story of the poor, genius rich boy rejected by his family who’d butchered his mother and brother. He found himself wanting it to be true, even with everything it implied, but it wasn’t, not entirely. Some of it felt wrong, it tasted wrong, like bread with no flavour. Other parts he knew to be false, like he knew the mark on his arm had not come from surgery because he remembered how it had happened, by the side of an Arizona road, along with the name of a man and a conviction that he must save him somehow. And when he had saved that man, and burned the contract that recorded his name, the mark had changed again, from a I to a II. He had seen it happen. He was sure he had.
He could test it, prove to himself that he had not imagined it. The letter from the cellar was of the same kind as the one he had burned in Arizona, an implied bargain written in blood upon a scrubbed page. And he had felt the same sense of duty towards Léo, that he was there to save him, which meant he needed to destroy this contract too and free him from the curse of his grandfather’s bargain.
Solomon picked up the letter from the cellar, shrugged off his jacket and shirt to reveal the brand on his shoulder, two parallel lines of raised flesh. He had stolen a lighter from the police car anticipating this moment and took it now, sparking a flame and touching it to the edge of the page.
Pain seized his arm the moment the contract started to burn, a heat rising like lava inside his flesh. He dropped the letter and bit down against the searing agony and watched the skin redden and bubble around his brand as the II turned to a III and a new word burned into his mind:
Furst.
He repeated it, searching it for meaning as the page burned then curled to ash and was extinguished. Solomon rubbed his hand over the new mark on his arm, a III now where the II had been, repeating the word that had come with it.
Furst.
He knew that name. He had just read it.
He picked up the file again and found a copy of a report from a forensics lab in Tucson that had been marked as ‘Archived’. It recorded a corrupted match for a sample sent to the lab regarding a suspect in a murder enquiry. The suspect’s name was listed as Solomon Creed. The DNA match was from a hair found in an archaeological dig in Melek Mezar, Turkey. The sample had been marked as corrupted because Carbon-14 tests had dated the hair as belonging to a man who had lived around four thousand years earlier, which ruled it out as a possible match. Except the test strips were also included in the document and they did match. Exactly.
The white noise of information in Solomon’s head switched to new details plucked from this information:
Melek Mezar – Turkish for ‘Tomb of the Angel’.
Believed to be the resting place and shrine of a powerful, Messianic prophet who lived two thousand years before Christ.
Excavated in the year 2000 by a Dr Brendan Furst. Born Dublin, 20 March 1968. Studied Classics and History at Balliol College, Oxford. Disappeared on his birthday, 2004. Current location unknown.
Solomon picked up the sliver of mirror and looked at his reflection. His hair had darkened to a silvery grey, shot through with stripes of black. He took out the second shard of mirror, the one he had found in Arizona, another fragment of something bigger. Was he reclaiming himself piece by piece with each new step on his journey, colouring in the empty man he had been at the beginning? He thought of Magellan and what part he was playing in all of this. He’d said he knew who Solomon really was. And it was he who had put this file together, the truths and the lies, he who had pursued him from Arizona to France, his name that had surfaced in his mind when he had burned the first contract. He thought of him as he had last seen him, lying in the wreckage of the crashed car.
Only I can tell you who you really are, he had said.
And Solomon believed him.
He heard the sirens again, floating on the wind, and wondered if Magellan was caught up in what was now happening in Mulhouse. He doubted it. Magellan had showed no interest in working with the authorities or playing by other people’s rules. He would be in the wind, like Solomon was, location unknown like Dr Brendan Furst.
Solomon stared at the river flowing by, thinking about what to do next and which direction he should go. He wanted to find Magellan, on his own terms this time, and find out how much of the psychiatric notes had been fabricated and why. He wanted to discover what truths he was hiding, and learn how much of the story of James Hawdon was his. He needed to find Dr Furst too, save him from something unknown and reclaim another lost fragment of himself in the process. And then there was Jefferson Hawdon, casting his long shadow over everything. James Hawdon’s father. Maybe Solomon’s father too.
Three possible directions to travel in. One direction to make.
And the river flowed on beneath Solomon’s gaze, reflecting the trees and the brightening day as it had done for century upon century. It flowed on still when the man rose up and walked away, buttoning his shirt and jacket as he disappeared into the woods, and back into the shadows.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was hard to write, not just technically but also because of the subject running like a dark bass note beneath the story. The Holocaust is a truly terrible subject to take on and I thought long and deep about whether it was a suitable element to include in, what is primarily, a piece of entertainment. But, as with all my books, I always try and explore some deeper, underlying theme through the action and suspense and in this case the recent political shift towards a nationalistic Right suggested that the wheel of history was turning back in that dark direction. Britain voted to leave the EU while I was writing this book. Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Marine Le Pen solidified her popularity in France with a party not a million miles away in poli
tical intent from the one I invented for this book. And all of these political shifts were fuelled by the same kinds of rhetoric of intolerance and fear that brought the Nazis into power and all that ultimately came with that. This is largely a book about memory and the importance of remembering, even the difficult stuff – especially the difficult stuff. And there is nothing more difficult, or important, to remember than the Holocaust.
I spent a lot of time researching the death camps because, even though I was constructing a fiction, I felt it was my duty to get the details of what happened right. Die Schneider Lager never existed but camps exactly like it did, and everything I described happening there happened too, to real people. To list all the resources I used would fill too many pages and actually the most useful and powerful research I found was the recorded testimony of real survivors. So if you’re interested in the genuine stories behind my woven one I’ve uploaded a research document on the page for this book on my website (www.simontoyne.net) with links to the online sources I used, including those interviews with survivors from various death camps as well as the Łódź Ghetto.
A large part of this story is set in a town called Cordes-sur-Ciel in France. Unusually in my books, where I tend to make places up wholesale, this is an actual town and is pretty much as described here. The majority of this book was written there too, which would make you think that all descriptions should be one hundred per cent accurate. In truth I have taken small licences here and there for the sake of the story, and, in these instances, I apologize to my French neighbours, particularly the local gendarmes who aren’t anything like the ones in this book. Cordes is a beautiful and magical place and I owe it a huge debt for giving me inspiration and a quiet place to write. If you look on my website you’ll find plenty of pictures of that too (www.simontoyne.net).