by Peter May
During the nearly three-hour flight, he had stared blindly out into the endless blue, lost in a turmoil of thoughts about Charlotte and his unborn son. Thoughts that had kept him awake most of the night, listening to the flights coming and going, trying to reach some decision about a course of action. In the end, he had realised that he was powerless to do anything. At least until the child was born. Then, with the fear of termination no longer an issue, he could surely make some legal claim on the child. But he had been haunted, during all those waking hours, by the words that Charlotte had used to cut him open and lay him bare. For heaven’s sake, Enzo, for once in your life think about someone else for a change.
He gazed from the window as the outskirts of Agadir grew up around the arterial route that led unwaveringly toward downtown. Nearly fifty years after the quake, it still looked like a town in ruins. Unfinished apartment blocks sprang up like weeds from the dust and rubble. Roads had been laid out around gap sites, and satellite dishes grew like fungus on unrendered cement. Here and there was the odd splash of colour, red, green, blue, amongst all the grey. Stores and stalls selling clothes and groceries. Enzo was reminded of video footage he had seen on TV of a bombed-out Beirut.
As they neared the coast and the city centre, they passed walled villas slumbering in the shade of tall trees, rows of store fronts open for business. The traffic thickened, like cholesterol slowing the bloodflow, until they reached the boulevard that followed the shoreline along the tourist strip. Luxury hotels, palm trees, manicured lawns.
Enzo saw the curve of the beach, a deep crescent of golden sand washed by warm north Atlantic waters. It stretched away into a hazy distance, where the land rose above the docks at the north end and the remains of the old kasbah stood on the hill above.
Enzo tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Could you take me to the kasbah?”
The driver shrugged, without turning. “Nothing to see there, monsieur.”
“All the same…”
He shrugged again. “Sure.”
Major new highways converged on an enormous circular junction at the foot of the hill where the original city had once stood, and the driver turned off, circumventing road works and bumping over broken tarmac before heading up toward the walls of the kasbah. The road wound steeply around the hillside before spilling them out into a large paved parking area.
“You walk from here,” the driver said. “I’ll wait for you.”
Enzo stood looking out over the wall that bounded the car park down on to the docks below, the marina, and the port where all the fishing boats were tied up in rows. Then he turned to brave the touts and stall holders who lined the climb toward the old gate. He brushed aside offers of carpets and jewelry, pottery and camel rides, bottles of soda and food proffered by filthy fingers. Faces that were hopeful on his approach spat imprecations at his back, and he passed through the old gateway, climbing up broken steps into the kasbah itself.
He had not known quite what to expect, but when finally he arrived, there was nothing to see. The old broken-down city walls contained only rubble, sand, and dusty desert shrubs clinging obstinately to cracks in the parched earth. An old man in a timeworn djellaba, his head wrapped in grey cloth, followed him around, holding out a black kid goat.
It was almost impossible to imagine this as a thriving town of streets and apartments, restaurants and souks, a place thronging with people and life. Those who had died here remained here, beneath the buildings that had fallen on them. Like one enormous cemetery where the bodies of many thousands were entombed for eternity, a reminder, if any were needed, of the forces that nature wielded over man.
And here, too, was where the three operatives of the Wiesenthal organisation had died as they were closing in on the war criminal, Erik Fleischer. The same place that Fleischer himself had supposedly perished. But all Enzo could see now in his mind’s eye was the yellow Post-it stuck between the pages of the Everyman encyclopaedia in Killian’s study. He did not die.
In the shadow of the hill, the road ran around the perimeter of the docks. Huge rusting sheds shimmered in the heat, and the hulking carcasses of half-built boats stood, ribs exposed, like the skeletons of strange beasts long extinct. The decaying remains of ancient fishing boats sat up in the dry docks like the rotting remains of beached whales, and hundreds of small, blue-painted fishing craft were tied up to lines of wooden posts stretching across the inner harbour.
The fish market and the Office National des Peches had been rebuilt since Fleischer’s day, a big square cream-coloured concrete building with pale blue stripes. A long gallery high up in the apex of the roof ran from one end of the building to the other, and windows all along its length looked down onto the trading floor below. Fish were beautifully laid out in colourful patterns in rectangular wooden boxes contained within numbered lots. Silver sea bream, red mullet, yellow snapper, sardines, white-coated buyers clustered around them in bidding frenzies. Raised voices echoed around the chamber as Enzo walked along the shiny wet concrete of the gallery with the latest in a long line of Fleischer’s successors.
Ahmed el Ghoumari was a personable young man with dark smiling eyes and unblemished olive skin. He wore an expensive suit, with a white shirt and red tie. His black shoes were polished to an impossible shine. He did not look like a man who managed a fish market.
“Your father’s uncle?” he said.
“No, he was on my mother’s side of the family. She was Italian, but her mother was French. Uncle Yves is the missing piece of the family jigsaw.”
“Of course, so many people died in the earthquake, their bodies never recovered. But I’m afraid Yves Vaurs was long before my time. I wasn’t even born then.” Ahmed el Ghoumari laughed, an infectious laugh full of unself-conscious good humour. “The only one I can think of who might have been around in those days was old Khalid.” There was an affection in his smile as he spoke the old man’s name. “Long past retirement, but no one has ever had the heart to ask him to go. He works in the accounts department now as a runner.” He chuckled. “I use the word ‘works’ advisedly. And it is probably about thirty years since he ran anywhere. He sits in the office and smokes cigarettes, and passes comment on the world, and has long lunches in the fish restaurant down the road. He will be only too happy to talk to you, monsieur.”
Khalid was even happier when Enzo offered to buy him lunch. He wore a grey and cream djellaba over faded jeans and open sandals, and he pulled the hood of it up over his baseball cap as they ventured out into the midday sun. He was an old man with a sun-dried face the colour and texture of a walnut. He walked with a limp and a stick, and had a hand-rolled cigarette permanently glued between his lips at the right-hand corner of his mouth.
Fish restaurants lined the road that led to the harbour, little more than prefab huts with open frontages and lines of plastic tables and chairs shaded by huge white parasols. Old Khalid ordered mixed seafood platters for them both and a jug of Pepsi-Cola. Enzo could have done with a beer or a chilled white wine. But neither was an option. Prodigious amounts of fried fish, prawns, and squid arrived on two enormous platters, and Khalid began gorging himself as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. For a man half Enzo’s size, it seemed as if he might be capable of eating twice as much.
“I was really just a gamin when Monsieur Vaurs was the manager here. Eighteen or nineteen. I started out on the fishing boats when I was twelve, but crushed my foot in a stupid accident when I was seventeen. I wasn’t fit for the fishing after that. It was Monsieur Vaurs who took me on here. Gave me a job when no one else would. He was a good man.”
Enzo remembered Cohen’s tale about the young prisoner in Mauthausen with the inflamed foot and wondered if Fleischer and Vaurs could really be the same person.
“Poor guy. Died in the earthquake. But just one of thousands, so maybe no one really grieved for him but me. I was lucky, lost no family. But everyone else was too busy grieving for parents, wives, husbands, children. It was a terrible time, monsieur. You
have no idea.” He spat out some fishbones on to the plastic table cover and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before slurping several mouthfuls of Pepsi.
“Yves lived alone then?”
“As far as any of us knew.” Khalid grinned suddenly, revealing a mouthful of gaps and yellow stumps. “Though there was a rumour about an affair with the wife of some politician.”
“Who?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know, monsieur. No one did. Maybe it was just a story. But he had a certain… mystique… about him. You know? A sort of swagger. Self-confident. Like a man who was screwing the wife of someone important.” He laughed. “He had the style of the French. You could have believed anything about him.”
“Everyone thought he was French, then?”
Khalid looked at him blankly. “Why wouldn’t they, monsieur, since that is what he was?” He opened a tin that he produced from some hidden pocket, and took out a badly rolled cigarette. He lit it and sucked in a lungful of smoke. “Come to think of it, I might just have a photograph of him somewhere at home. There was a party to celebrate someone’s retirement, and all the staff were there. There were a lot of pictures taken that night. I have a few of them. Or, at least, I did at one time.”
The taxi took them deep into the rebuilt heart of the new Agadir. Apartment blocks lined narrow streets with shops and stalls and spindly trees with dusty green leaves shading donkeys and bicycles. Khalid talked nonstop with their driver in Arabic, sitting next to him in the front seat of the battered Volkswagen, smoking profusely. Enzo sat on his own in the back, staring from the window at the blur of colour and people that smeared his vision. He wasn’t really looking, lost still in the despond into which Charlotte had plunged him.
The entrance to Khalid’s apartment block was in a shaded alleyway that climbed steeply off the main drag. Enzo paid the driver and followed the old man through an archway and up a tiny staircase to the third floor. The heat was stifling and increased as they climbed. Arab music was blasting out somewhere from a badly tuned radio, and the sound of raised voices rose with the heat from the street below. They squeezed past several bicycles padlocked together on the landing and stepped over boxes and bric-a-brac cluttering the hallway just inside Khalid’s tiny apartment. A single room served as a living, dining, kitchen area, with a curtain closing off a recess with a bed. The floor and every available laying space was littered with the detritus of this man’s life. Newspapers, books, empty food cartons, bottles, dirty plates. All the windows were open wide, and the fetid air of the apartment vibrated to the hum of countless flies.
“Have a seat,” Khalid said over his shoulder, as he searched the drawers of an old dresser.
Enzo looked around. But he could not have sat without moving things off chairs. “That’s all right,” he said.
Finally, the old man turned toward him, clutching an envelope of old photographic prints, grinning widely, his eyes screwed up against the smoke that rose into them from his cigarette. “Got them.” He started leafing through the faded prints, colours that had long since lost their lustre, chuckling and muttering to himself as he recognised forgotten faces, and dredged up long lost memories. Finally he let out a deep sigh of satisfaction. “Ahhhh.” And he held out a dog-eared print for Enzo to take. “Yves Vaurs is the one in the middle.”
Here was a group, standing awkwardly together, smiling self-consciously for the camera. Women with covered heads, a couple of men in djellabas, the rest in suits. The faces of people long dead. Enzo wondered how many of them had died in the earthquake.
The man in the middle stood taller than the rest. He had a fine head of thick, black hair and smiled more easily than the others. Although older, it was, unmistakably, the same man in the photograph Gerard Cohen had shown him. Proof, if any were needed now, that Erik Fleischer and Yves Vaurs were one and the same man. A man who had not died, as everyone believed, in the terrible earthquake of 1960. A man who was still alive and living on a tiny island off the coast of Brittany in France.
Chapter Thirty-Five
There was something a little unreal about being back on the island after the heat and the bright sunlight of North Africa. Here the air was the colour of sulphur, the sky low and bruised. He’d had some hours to acclimatise himself again to the late French fall during the long train ride from Paris and a blowy crossing on the ferry. But the wind whipping rain into his face as he disembarked at Port Tudy still came as a shock, stinging his skin red and soaking his jacket and trousers as he struggled with his umbrella to cross the street to Coconut’s car rental.
The rain had eased by the time he drove down the hill into Port Melite, and a dark cloud of depression descended on him as he prepared to unravel the last of Adam Killian’s long-obscured message to his son. It would, he knew, lead him to a place he had no real desire to go.
Jane Killian was surprised to see him. “I didn’t expect you back so soon. Actually, you’re lucky you caught me. I’m just packing.” She headed back upstairs, and he followed her up and into the master bedroom. A suitcase lay open on the bed, clothes folded neatly around it. “I’m getting the ferry late afternoon. How was Paris?” She continued to lay items of clothing carefully into the suitcase.
“Wet. But I’ve been a little further afield than that.”
She turned to look at him. “Oh? Where?”
“Agadir.”
She seemed surprised at first, then nodded slowly. “The entry Papa marked in the encyclopedia. What did you find there?”
“A man called Yves Vaurs who was supposed to have died in 1960, but didn’t.”
She raised her eyebrows in surprise. “You actually met him?”
“No. But I talked to someone who knew him. And saw his photograph, a photograph of the same man whose picture I also saw in Paris. A man called Erik Fleischer.”
She stared at him, consternation drawing together frown lines between her brows. “None of this is making very much sense to me, Enzo.”
He hesitated, turning for a moment to gaze from the window across a dripping wet garden toward the annex. Then he turned back to her. “Why didn’t you tell me that Adam Killian spent time in a concentration camp during the war?”
She turned almost instantly pale, before a blush of pink appeared high on her cheeks, just below the eyes. “How do you know that?”
“I’m guessing. Am I right?”
She drew her lips into a tight line and nodded. “Yes. But no one in the world knew about that. Except Adam himself, and Peter. And, of course, me. Although Papa never knew that Peter had told me.”
“Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin, in Poland, right?”
Her eyes opened wider. “How can you possibly know all this?”
He ignored her questions. “Why was it such a secret?”
“Oh… I don’t know.” She waved her hand vaguely through the air. “All part of Papa’s denial of his past, I guess. Of his Polish origins. Although Peter knew about it, he said Papa would never speak of it. Never. And he made Peter promise not to tell anyone.”
“But he told you.”
“We were husband and wife.” There was a defensive tone in her voice. “We had no secrets between us. But I kept my promise of silence to Peter. That’s why you’ll find no reference to it or record of it anywhere.” Her eyes were troubled, confused. “But I don’t understand… If you found out about it, does that mean it has something to do with his murder?”
Enzo nodded. “It has everything to do with his murder, Jane.”
The same chill as always permeated the annex. Enzo’s depression deepened as he pushed open the door and stood under the naked electric light bulb that hung in the stairwell. He dropped his overnight bag on the floor, not sure how much longer he would be here, but reluctant to take it upstairs, as if to do so was committing him to another cold, lonely night in the attic bedroom.
With the tips of fingers spread wide, he pushed the door to Killian’s study, and it swung slowly inwards. The shutters were st
ill open, and the gloomy light that filtered through the trees in the garden fell through the window and cast dark shadows in every corner. Until he flicked the light switch and flooded the room with cold, harsh light.
Somewhere in here was the final piece of the Killian jigsaw. And he was determined to find it. He walked to the window and stared out into the garden, the trees black with rain, the lawn sodden and patchy. He caught a movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see the cat that had been haunting him since his arrival. It was sauntering across the grass, tail high, the end of it curled round at the highest point and quivering. Almost as if sensing his eyes on it, the cat stopped and stared at the window. Enzo could see its black coat glistening in the wet. What a miserable life, he thought. Always shut out in the cold and rain. And he wondered whose it was and why it had chosen the Killian garden as its home turf.
On an impulse he went back into the hall and opened the outside door. The cat was no more than eight or ten feet away. He left the door wide, and stood back, an invitation made by body language alone. The animal stood stock still, staring at him, but made no move. Enzo waited for several minutes before the cat finally sat down and continued to stare, clearly unprepared to accept his offer of truce.
“Okay, stay out in the rain, then,” he said, and immediately felt foolish for talking to it.
He left the door open and went back into the study. For a moment he stood gazing at the bookcase, then rounded the desk to look at the Post-its he had left lying on it, the message pad, the open diary, the poem propped against the lamp.