Douglas Brodie 03 - Pilgrim Soul

by Ferris, Gordon

  I looked round the pub at my fellow drinkers. There were a few loners gazing into their glasses or examining the runes of the racing pages. My future selves? I hefted my glass and pondered having another, but I’d had enough of introspection. I walked out into a night as dreich as a child’s funeral. I pulled my hat down and pulled up my coat collar against the cold drizzle.

  I zigzagged up the hill to Sam’s house and let myself in. She called down from the lounge.

  ‘There’s some cold ham under a plate, if you haven’t been to the Tallies.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I hung my coat and hat up, went down and made a ham sandwich. I took it up to join her. She looked up from her book with a smile. The Light Programme hummed softly in the background.

  ‘Well, Douglas?’ She meant, had I decided.

  I shrugged. ‘Why not, Sam? Why not.’

  I made an early start on Monday with a plunge into the great pool of the Western Baths Club. It had become a ritual, a penance and my salvation. A cure for hangovers and a banishment of the blues. By eight o’clock I was bashing through the swing doors of the Gazette’s newsroom as though I had a calling. No sign yet of Sandy Logan, former blue-pencil maestro in the sub’s chair and now acting editor in the absence of Eddie Paton.

  My aim was to clear the decks by lunchtime and then visit some of the crime scenes for my new employers. My supplementary employers. I reasoned that whatever came out of it – twenty quid a week for a few weeks not being the least of it – I was also garnering material for the crime column. I won every way you looked at it. I felt eager, like an old bloodhound with a fresh scent. I was even whistling as I typed.

  With no boss around this morning, I could press on with a final draft of a piece I’d been working on about corruption in local politics: a seemingly bottomless cesspit. During his reign before the war, Chief Constable Sillitoe banged up so many city fathers for graft that he was warned by the government that if one more went down, they would disband the council and run it from Whitehall.

  From my recent personal experience things hadn’t improved, though two of the venal councillors had received a grislier come-uppance than a mere prison sentence. I was now exploring other fishy contracts awarded without public tender to the good cousin of the ways and means chairman.

  By one o’clock I was walking past the bustling shops in Sauchiehall Street. I turned up on to Renfrew Street just so I could pass Mackintosh’s School of Art. Not just for the fancy windows and portals. The girls at art college had always been more interesting than the bluestockings reading English. Bohemian Scots. Educated but wild at heart. A potent mix. Another climb up Thistle Street on to Hill Street and I was walking along the ridge of Garnethill.

  Up here the criss-crossing streets were formed of the same grand red sandstone terraces, but, being perched on a hill, there was a brightness, an expansiveness to the place that was missing in the flatlands south of the Clyde. The folk themselves seemed less huddled, more prosperous. Maybe they were just fitter from clambering up and down hills all day.

  I walked into the echoing stone close with its smell of carbolic soap and climbed two flights of spotless clean stairs. I had a choice of doors and peered at the name plates: Kennedy or Bernstein. Applying my great investigative powers I knocked on the latter. I heard bolts sliding. The door opened and I was looking down at a tiny man with watery eyes blinking through thick specs held together at the bridge by Elastoplast. He wore two cardigans, baggy trousers and slippers.

  ‘Mr Bernstein? It’s Douglas Brodie, sir. I’m working for Shimon Belsinger and his colleagues. Investigating the thefts. Shimon said he’d warn you.’

  ‘Ja, ja. Come in, come in.’

  He shuffled off down the narrow corridor of brown-painted walls. I followed, breathing used air mixed with cooking smells. We emerged into a sitting room. A massive three-piece suite hogged the floor. Lost among the cushions and antimacassars was a tiny woman. She wore a curly russet wig that belied her mottled and sagging skin. A much younger woman occupied one of the big chairs. A big-eyed child curled in her lap, thumb firmly jammed in her mouth.

  The old man turned to me. ‘This is my wife, Mrs Bernstein. My daughter, Ruth, and my grand-daughter, Lisa.’ His voice softened when he mentioned the baby. His accent was thick and guttural with ‘wife’ coming out as a ‘vife’. He spoke slowly to make sure he’d said it right.

  I took a chance and replied in German. ‘Good afternoon. I’m here to see if we can catch the thief.’

  The old woman’s head jerked up. The young woman smiled. The old man’s shoulders dropped and he said, ‘Belsinger told me you spoke German. But why do you have a München accent?’

  I smiled. ‘I practised with Isaac Feldman and his wife, Hannah – rest her soul – when I was studying at Glasgow University. It upset my tutors.’

  Now the old woman broke in, using her native tongue, and I recognised the softer accent of Austria. ‘They say you were an officer in the British Army. You saw it all.’ The question was loaded with meaning: You saw what they did to us . . .

  ‘After the surrender I was assigned to interrogate Schutzstaffel officers; senior SS camp commanders, doctors and Gestapo.’

  Three pairs of adult eyes bored into me. I had brought horror into the room and they didn’t know whether to examine it further through my memories or to banish it and me before it could swallow them up. The child sensed tension and burrowed into her mother’s arms. This time it was the young woman who spoke, in English with a Glasgow lilt.

  ‘Come on now, Mama, Papa, Mr Brodie is here to help. We don’t want to hear war stories, do we? What do you want to ask us, Mr Brodie? Papa, let him sit. Where are our manners?’

  I took out my notebook. ‘Tell me what happened?’

  Bernstein began, ‘It is a short story. We go to shul on the Sabbath. The Garnethill Synagogue. Every week, same time.’

  ‘Sometimes we go to my sister’s first, Jacob.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. But when we go straight there it’s at the same time.’

  ‘Except on Hanukkah or Passover of course. Then we—’

  The old man flung up his arms and switched to German. ‘Mein Gott, Mrs Bernstein! Usually. That’s all Mr Brodie wants to know. Usually. And when the theft took place, it was a usual Sabbath.’

  ‘I was just saying. Explaining it right.’

  Bernstein turned to me and gave me a look of complicity. Women? What can you do?

  I took the baton. ‘So, when was this?’

  ‘The twelfth of October. I sold a fine little Austin the day before.’

  ‘You’re a car dealer?’ He nodded. ‘You all went? The house was left empty?’

  ‘Ach, yes. But we locked up. Every window. Every door. Even the doors inside, you understand?’

  ‘How long were you gone?’

  The old woman said, ‘We sometimes make it a nice day. After we walk down to Sauchiehall Street and maybe have some tea and cakes.’

  The old man rolled his eyes. ‘But not this day, Mrs Bernstein. Not that day. We just came home for Seudah Shilishit, the third meal.’

  ‘I’m just saying. Sometimes—’

  ‘But this day, we – came – home. Straight home. No diversion. It takes us ten minutes to walk there.’

  ‘So you were gone . . .?’

  ‘Two hours, maybe two and a half.’

  ‘And what happened when you got home? What did you find?’

  ‘A nightmare! That’s what we found!’ said Mrs Bernstein. ‘Our lives thrown upside down, that’s what happened. My jewels. My mother’s jewels. My best china. Except these cups. They were a wedding present and I kept them in a box . . . All gone. And my earrings, my lovely earrings . . .’ Her old eyes filled and she stumbled to a halt.

  The old man walked over and sat beside his wife on the couch. He took her hand and rubbed it, shushing her all the time. I’d witnessed scenes like it a dozen times when I was a copper working out of Tobago Street in the thirties. It wasn’t the cost of
an item, or its value. It was their story, their connection with the living or dead. For these old people, who’d fled fascism and left so much behind, it was a further severing of ties.

  I listened to their outrage and their hurt. I learned that a uniformed policeman had visited a few days later and taken a perfunctory statement but he’d never come back. They’d never been told what was happening.

  ‘Mr Bernstein, did the burglar break in? Was there any sign of damage to the door?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a mark. It was all locked up like I left it.’

  ‘Who has keys?’

  He looked at me as though I was daft. ‘Only me. And of course Mrs Bernstein. You don’t think I am careless with my keys?’

  ‘Good. What about visitors in the past month or two?’

  Mrs Bernstein chipped in, ‘My sister Bella came round. Such a lovely daughter she has. But no man yet. She needs—’

  ‘Mrs Bernstein!’ said her husband. ‘Mr Brodie wants to know who has been here. He doesn’t want their personal history.’

  ‘So – Mr Bernstein?’ I asked.

  ‘Apart from my good-sister Bella, no one.’ He shook his head and his glasses gave up the ghost. They fell in two bits on to the carpet and there was confusion and exclamations until they were joined back together by fresh Elastoplast.

  ‘Papa? There was a gas man, you told me.’

  ‘Ach, what news is that?’

  ‘When was this, Mr Bernstein? And why was he here?’

  ‘Papa, it was before the burglary. About a week or so.’

  ‘Mr Bernstein, did you let him in? How did you know he was a gas man?’

  Old Bernstein’s jaw jutted out. ‘He had a board with a sheet of paper on it. He looked at the meter. Am I stupid?’

  I left them, apologising as I did. Apologising explicitly for my old police comrades and for their cavalier attitude. Apologising implicitly for what had happened in Austria and across Germany and Poland and Russia without the West lifting a finger until it was too late. We’d hanged ten of the top Nazis at Nuremberg last month, but it hardly compensated for the hell they’d visited on millions.

  THREE

  I did two more interviews that afternoon, all within walking distance of each other and of the Garnethill synagogue. It seemed the gas board had been unusually solicitous lately. I was explaining my findings to Sam that evening.

  ‘That’s a pretty clear pattern, Douglas.’

  ‘It’s only three out of nine, and I don’t want to draw conclusions, but . . .’

  ‘See, you’re a natural.’

  ‘You mean I should ditch the reporting life and go back to sleuthing?’

  She coloured. ‘I wasn’t trying to push you down one track or the other. It’s your life.’

  I paused and decided to use the opening. ‘Would it make any difference to us if I did? I mean if I was earning more?’

  Sam turned away. ‘It’s not that, not at all.’

  ‘Then what is it, Sam? We could turn this house of sin into a happy family home.’

  She rounded on me, her eyes glittering. ‘House of sin, is it? That’s the worst proposal I’ve ever had.’

  ‘How many have you had lately?’

  ‘As in I’m an old spinster and I should grab the chance because it’s likely to be my last?’

  Bugger. ‘That’s not what I meant!’

  We were poised like boxers, waiting for the next blow. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Samantha Campbell, I love you. I want to marry you. Why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m not. Well, I am. You made me.’

  ‘Tears of joy, then?’

  ‘Shut up, Brodie.’

  I stepped forward and held my arms open. She welded herself against me. Her heart hammered against my ribs. I could smell her hair. Her voice vibrated in my chest.

  ‘We only met in April.’

  ‘Long enough to know me.’

  She pushed herself back and studied me.

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘We don’t have to rush it. Just have the intent.’

  ‘If I got married I’d have to give up my job. There are no married women in our chambers, not even secretaries.’

  ‘And I couldn’t support us both on my pittance. Hardly even the coal bill for this grand place.’

  She turned away. ‘It’s not that. We’d manage. Somehow. But I worked so hard to get here. I don’t want to give it all up. I promised myself and I promised my parents I’d get silk. Hah! The way I’ve been flapping around all year I’ll be lucky to have a job by Christmas.’

  ‘We could keep it quiet.’

  ‘They’d find out. And I don’t want a Gretna Green do, thank you very much!’

  She was right. Neither did I. We were better than that. I hoped.

  She wiped her eyes, poured us each a glass of whisky and we put the argument aside for another day.

  The next day I spread my search to the south side, over Glasgow Bridge and into Laurieston. Into another world. Radiating out from the imposing synagogue in South Portland Street is a network of streets and courts studded with shops garlanded in Hebrew. Posters in Yiddish adorned spare walls, and distinctive hats and beards and long black coats stood out among the whey-faced natives. The smells were richly different; leavened bread and sugary cakes; barrels of herring standing outside for inspection. And everywhere a sense of bubbling life, language and accents competing and clashing in a joyous babel.

  I called in on Isaac Feldmann’s tailor’s shop. I nodded to the ageless and familiar mannequins in his window and went inside, the bell heralding my entrance. Isaac stuck his head out from behind the curtain to the back room.

  ‘Douglas. It’s you. Welcome. Come have coffee. Meet my boy, Amos. See if you can talk some sense into him.’

  ‘It’s been a long time, Amos.’ I shook the young man’s hand. I’d last seen him as bright-eyed teenager before the war. This was a man coming into his prime. Tall, with an assured manner and his mother’s great eyes behind the specs. I wondered what his younger sister Judith looked like now.

  ‘He’s a doctor, Douglas. A doctor in the family!’

  ‘Congratulations!’

  Amos flushed. ‘Not yet, Father. Still two years to go, Mr Brodie. If I finish.’ His voice was smart Scottish, the product of good schooling.

  ‘Ach, listen to him. Of course you will finish. Your mother would turn in her grave.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Father. I have to make my own way.’

  ‘And what is that? What nonsense are you telling me?’

  I’d obviously come at a bad time. Amos sighed and explained to me: ‘I’m thinking of going to Palestine. It’s where we belong.’

  So this was the family trouble Isaac had mentioned.

  ‘Well, Amos, they certainly need doctors over there.’

  Isaac picked up the thread. ‘See! Douglas is right. It’s a bloodbath over there! At least wait till it settles.’

  ‘That could be years away, Dad! I want to be there at the start.’

  I asked gently, ‘How would you get in, Amos? We’re blockading the ports.’

  Palestine was a cauldron. Arabs and Jews competing for the same strip of desert, each claiming ancient rights. No give either side. All or nothing. And the poor bloody British Army stuck in the middle trying to keep the peace while the infant United Nations tried to find a solution. No sign of a Solomon. It seems I’d touched a nerve. Amos turned on me.

  ‘Yes, you are! And it’s shameful! After what our people went through!’ He calmed himself. ‘Mr Brodie, the ones that are left need a home. Israel is our home.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that. The world should die of shame for what the Nazis did. But it needs to be done by agreement. By law.’

  His dark eyes blazed behind his glasses. ‘Pah! My people were gassed and burnt in ovens waiting for the law. Laws don’t apply to Jews. People do what they like to us. And we let it happen. Never again!’

  I had only one argume
nt. ‘But, Amos, you’re killing the peacekeepers. Are you going to join one of the gangs? Take up a Tommy gun? What about your family?’ I knew he had a wife and young daughter.

  ‘Go on, answer Douglas! You’ll join Lehi. Become a murderer. Is that what we raised you for?’ Isaac was on his feet, stabbing a finger at his son.

  It summed it up. The disputatious peoples of the Middle East had fought for centuries over which strand of monotheism was best. Fought each other; fought themselves. Within the Jewish tribe, the latest argument was about Zionism – the creation of a Jewish State – and how to achieve it. While we were at war against Nazism, the Middle East was having its own convulsions. And now it threatened to be the new battleground for the world.

  ‘Never Lehi! They supported the Nazis, Father.’

  ‘So which is it to be? The gentle souls in Haganah? How about the peaceful Irgun Zvai Leumi? Or the angels in Palmach?’

  Isaac was ticking off on his fingers the amoeba-like factions spawning terrorism across Palestine and now shipping it to Britain. They’d captured a member of Lehi – we called them the Stern Gang after their dead founder – in Glasgow last week. God knows what he was up to. They’d bombed our embassy in Rome last month.

  ‘Stop, stop! I know you think I’m mad. Well, I’m not. I’m just angry, Father. Don’t I have a right?’

  Isaac let his arm drop. His face collapsed. I thought he was going to weep.

  ‘Amos, no one is angrier than me. I just don’t want to lose you.’

  I left Isaac and his son embracing in tearful reconciliation, but I didn’t think it was the end of this debate. In the meantime, however, I had a much simpler Jewish puzzle to solve.

  FOUR

  By Wednesday night I’d interviewed all the robbery victims. I had a clear enough picture of the crimes and I was rehearsing my findings with Sam before explaining to Shimon Belsinger and his pals.