A Place Of Strangers

by Geoffrey Seed

  Now he realised why.

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Interrogate memory, McCall. Who were you, once upon a time?

  A baby, a toddler, a little boy.

  What else?

  A witness.

  A witness to what?

  To what happened.

  *

  This is the BBC Light Programme. It’s a quarter to two and time for Listen with Mother. Are you sitting comfortably?

  He likes this story-teller best – Daphne Oxenford. He has even learned to say her name. Daf-en-ee-ox-en-ford. He repeats it over and over in his head. He used to think she lived in the wireless but he looked inside and she doesn’t. The wireless is on a shelf by the fireplace. He always sits on a wooden stool to listen. The stool is painted green and the wireless hums and crackles in his ear when it is switched on and the voices come out.

  He likes stories. He can read, too. Mummy has taught him. Ber-lin, Hil-ver-sum, Lux-em-berg. That’s what it says on the dial. People in London are on the wireless. Mummy comes from London. He’s been on his own with her today. It’s better when they are on their own.

  She is washing at the sink and wearing an apron over her skirt and a headscarf she calls a turban and puts on when she sweeps the floor. Mummy is always sweeping the floor. It’s dirty from the mud outside but this is not their house and the farmer won’t make it nice for them. The farm is a long way to walk. They go there to get eggs. Sometimes Mummy cries and he gives her a kiss when her face is wet.

  She says she has headaches and they make her cry. When the wireless story finishes, he is going to play outside. He likes playing on his own. He never really is on his own because he makes up stories and there are people in the stories with names and things to do which he’s heard on the wireless.

  Today is sunny. There is a bird’s nest in the hedge. He’s going to look inside but very quietly, not to scare the bird.

  Daddy comes in with his gun. His boots are muddy. Mummy asks him to take them off outside. He shouts at her. He always shouts.

  She wants to know where he has been because his food has dried up in the oven. He says he doesn’t want any and she says it’s because he’s been drinking so why does she bother cooking anything. Daddy shouts even louder and says if she didn’t shout at him, he would come home. He takes some things from underneath his big jacket and throws them on the table.

  There is a rabbit and a beautiful bird with golden red feathers and a long tail. Their eyes are like glass and he looks into them ever so closely and can see himself very small, like someone who could live in the wireless.

  Mummy shouts at Daddy again, louder and louder. Sometimes they smack each other and then they both cry. He has seen Daddy cry. He does big cries and his whole body shakes and his face goes red. Then he doesn’t do any painting for days and Mummy’s always upset then.

  He touches the bird’s feathers. They’re so shiny. The colours all change if you turn his head with your hand. The rabbit has whiskers and soft patches of white and brown fur with blood on its nose. He doesn’t like it when Daddy goes shooting. But he says if he doesn’t go shooting, there won’t be anything to eat.

  His gun’s very big and heavy and has two barrels. Daddy’s holding it now. Mummy’s crying. She says he’s no good. But he’s just got us something to eat so he must be some good. Daddy says she should have married someone else and Mummy says she wishes she had because he is no use. They’re both trying to smack each other again. Daddy’s smacked him lots of times. Daddy’s boots are making dirty marks on the tiles and Mummy’s lost her slippers.

  He hides under the table with his hands over his ears because he doesn’t like this. He’s scared. He can still see them and Mummy’s got something in her hand and is trying to scratch Daddy’s face with it. He’s trying to push her away but she catches him and he squeals and drops the gun.

  The gun falls. The gun falls onto the tiles. The gun falls onto the tiles ever so slowly. It hits the tiles stock first. One of the hammers jolts down. A cartridge is fired. The room detonates with noise. The stones in the wall and the glass in the windows shake with fear.

  The sound doesn’t stop. It has a life of its own. It tunnels into his ears and roars around his skull till he can take no more. Then it all goes quiet.

  Daddy picks up his gun and runs from the kitchen. Little particles of plaster are falling from the ceiling... .falling like snow, gently covering the bird and the rabbit and his mother lying on the tiles she tries to keep clean.

  He is alone. He kneels by Mummy. She’s on her side. One of her hands is stretched out, the other is across her tummy. Her fingers claw at the floor then go still. The back of her dress and her apron are cut up like ribbons. Red ribbons. But it’s her skin peeling off where she’s been hit by the little lead shots in the cartridge.

  That’s the end of our story today, children. We’ll be here again tomorrow. Until then, goodbye everyone. Goodbye.

  There is powdered plaster in Mummy’s hair and on her sleepy face. He begs her to wake up. But she doesn’t. He’ll go and get help, run to the farm, find Daddy. Someone will know what to do. He kisses Mummy’s forehead. His lips feel dusty. He wipes them with the back of his hand then runs into the sunshine. He passes the hedge where the bird’s nest is and the tea chest that’s his fort and boat but there’s no one to be seen.

  He is panting for breath and his head still rings with shouts and bangs and all that he doesn’t understand. Then he sees Daddy. He calls out but Daddy doesn’t hear. Daddy’s going to where the farmer keeps his hay for the animals. He calls out but still Daddy doesn’t hear so he runs towards him.

  The hay bales are stacked on top of each other, higher than a house. Daddy’s still got his gun. Something must be wrong with it because he’s blowing into the barrels. He’s about to shout again when there’s another bang – a bang so loud it bounces between the hills and sets all the birds clacking and cawing into the sky.

  And there is Daddy on the ground. He’s sleeping now, too.

  Everywhere in the straw above him is covered in new poppies. It’s like a field of blood-red poppies, not flat but reared up on its end. And the poppies are all glistening and melting and soaking into the golden hay. Some of the petals fall by his feet and he picks them up. They are warm and wet and discolour his fingers.

  Chapter Thirty Five

  McCall lay in a field of new corn amid the scatter of offal from the dead deer. Every part of his body hurt and he could not move to crawl back inside the shelter of the car. His dim reflection in the silver hubcap slowly became whiter like the figure in his head he never understood. He thought of soldiers dying in no man’s land, calling out for the comfort of their mothers. McCall wanted to cry out for his but the strength was draining from him and the wind would have buried his words in snow if he had.

  *

  The moon-driven tides breaking on the rocks where Herod’s palace once stood in Caesarea perpetually shift the sands which covered evidence of conquest, torture and death since Phoenician times. Man’s power ebbs and flows like the constant sea. All his efforts amount to nought in time.

  Arie Minsky would walk the beach each day, treading by the drowned remains of the once great city from where Rome ruled Palestine. He might pick up tiny, green-gold coins last used when Jews were being torn apart by tigers to amuse the amphitheatre mob. More often, it would be perfectly cut tesserae from a mosaic – red, ivory, orange, half an inch square and all worn smooth.

  Minsky could imagine the feet of Herod himself walking on these very fragments when they had been the tiniest parts of some grand and beautiful design, now lost to sight forever.

  He kept his finds in a shallow olive wood dish on his desk. It was Minsky’s unconscious habit to make patterns with them if ever something demanded his unhindered reflection. He was making patterns now, staring through the open window to his garden of bitter aloe trees, troubled by how best to deal with the problem of McCall. There was a time when Arie Minsky would n
ot have left such a matter to chance.

  *

  McCall first dropped acid after a Yardbirds gig in Cambridge in ’65 with a pal who stole Jeff Beck’s bottle neck from his guitar case but was dead within a year, convinced he could fly from his roof. Similar wild imaginings came to McCall in the moments after his crash.

  He saw iridescent birds and rainbows of flowers but as he reached out to touch, there was nothing – no colour but white, no movement but wind. And all that in a bone-cracking cold where sleep beckoned forever. So the falling snow became the sheets of his bed and he slowly drifted away.

  *

  ‘McCall? McCall? You’ll be OK. Do you hear?’

  The faintest of sounds found him, like the sonar of a submarine lost deep under the ice. Beep... beep... beep. Wires. Tubes. Equipment. And above him, a face he did not know and a hand he had never held. Or thought he hadn’t, anyway.

  ‘You’ve had an accident. You’re in hospital but you’re going to be all right.’

  Rosa. The dancing man’s daughter. Rosa. The woman in the night who cried to be loved. But where was Bea? Where was Francis? Where were the others who meant so much to him?

  Far, far away – as they always had been. McCall’s eyes closed again.

  Beep... beep... beep.

  *

  Evie sat in the secure communications room of the British Embassy’s modernist box of a building on the sea front in Tel Aviv, waiting for a spook colleague in London to get back in touch. She had already rung McCall’s office at the BBC from Arie Minsky’s house in Akko. They said he was still off work sick. No one had heard from him – not even a postcard to Mrs Craven at Garth or to her mother. The only other person Evie guessed McCall might contact was Gerry Gavronski, his lefty magazine chum.

  Gavronski was a backstairs advisor to the miners’ national strike committee so his phone had an ear on it. It had been Evie’s job to read transcripts of Gavronski’s private conversations during the strike... all of them, even those with the journo lover her parish officer knew nothing about. That was the way of it in Evie’s world. Fathers were not the only ones to be betrayed.

  The embassy cipher clerk handed her the decoded reply from London.

  Target rang G three days ago. Wanted to locate one Arie Minsky. G duly obliged and called him back to a number in Elm Creek, Canada listed to a ‘Rosa Virbalis.’ G said A.M. in Israel. Target said he would book flight soonest.

  Target mentioned being in a traffic accident. No further details.

  Over supper that night, Evie only told Bea and Minsky that McCall intended to travel to Israel. Minsky did not ask how she found this out. For her part, Evie showed no surprise that he seemed to know this information already.

  *

  McCall lay on Rosa’s living room couch, face and body still badly bruised, one eye half closed, head stitched up, ribs cracked. Only McCall thought he was fit to leave hospital. There was no question of telling her – or the police – what had really happened. Either some homicidal local yahoo had sported with McCall or someone was giving him the gypsy’s warning. He knew which was the more likely.

  How odd he should owe his life to a Nazi’s daughter, passing his wreckage on her way to work. How odd he should research her father’s death only to find the truth about his own... and his mother’s, too. The forked roads he travelled since emerging mute and stinking and half out of his head from all he had seen those years before, were gradually coming together.

  His anger at Bea and Francis began to abate. They had lied – but only to save him from what was locked in his head. Yet that alone did not get them out of the dock.

  Three men – however evil – had died in strange and mysterious circumstances. The fingerprints of Bea, Francis and Arie Minsky were all over the crime scenes. If someone felt threatened by this being exposed and was trying to frighten him off, then any hack worth a by-line knew this was reason enough to keep buggering on.

  He heard Rosa’s car then the porch door being unlocked. She came in and saw his obvious discomfort as he carried an armful of logs to the stove.

  ‘You just lay back, McCall. I’ll see to it and get us some dinner.’

  Part of him felt indebted to Rosa and wanted to tell her everything – about himself, what happened to his parents, about Bea and Francis and their conspiracy with Minsky. But he could hear Francis’s warning. Information shared is an advantage lost. He should leave nothing behind in Canada which might come back and bite him. Rosa herself never pressed McCall over who the people in his photographs were or exactly what they had done.

  But the night before he left, she seemed to want him to understand how she become reconciled to her father’s death.

  ‘I guess there was a kind of terrible rough justice in what happened... him being found and made to pay for what he’d done.’

  ‘Yes, but he should’ve had a trial under the law. Without that, it’s mob rule.’

  ‘They never got one... those women and children back then.’

  ‘That’s just it, Rosa. What he did then was wicked but so was what happened to him.’

  ‘Is it worth all this pain, McCall... raking everything up again to go on TV and say two wrongs don’t make a right? How worthwhile is that?’

  If Rosa feared what she might suffer after any publicity about how and why her father died, McCall understood more than she could ever realise.

  *

  McCall cleared Customs at Ben Gurion Airport, changed dollars into shekels then boarded a bus to that most lucent and holy of cities, Jerusalem. He was immediately enveloped in the foreignness of everything around him.

  Israeli soldiers going home on leave sat with their rifles alongside white-turbaned Bedouin in ankle-length jillabas and excited pilgrims, about to walk Christ’s journey to his crucifixion. Through the open windows came the smell of goats and sheep and pine trees blowing from the warm bouldered hills where shot-up army vehicles still rusted with honour from yesterday’s wars.

  He slept fitfully on the long flight from Canada, sustained by pain-killers and Scotch. He ached in body and mind and needed to recover before ever confronting Arie Minsky.

  A guest house close to the Jaffa Gate had a third floor room with a bath and a view over the Old City’s Armenian Quarter. McCall unpacked and looked down on cowled monks keeping to the shadows of its thick limestone walls. The soft tapping of silversmiths making jewellery came from within houses built before the Crusades.

  McCall soaked himself for an hour then put on the jeans and white T-shirt Rosa had washed and walked down through the lobby.

  ‘Excuse, Sir. Mr McCall, Sir?’

  He turned to see the smiling Arab receptionist following him outside into the late afternoon sun.

  ‘I have message for you.’

  ‘For me? You can’t have.’

  ‘On telephone, Sir. A man says for Mr McCall to go to the American Colony Hotel.’

  ‘But no one knows I’m here. Who was this man?’

  ‘He does not say. He just say Mrs Wrenn will be there at six tonight.’

  Bea... in Jerusalem? How the hell did she know he was there? McCall was caught off guard. Would Minsky be with her? Why had she quit her cruise? And where was Evie? He looked around. It was easy to feel paranoid here... so many spies and factions, all hating each other.

  He disappeared into the sandal-smoothed warrens of the ancient covered market. Traders called from every side – jewellers, artists, potters, trinket merchants, all jostling for his money. He kept moving, breathing in the ever-changing aroma – oranges and limes, sandalwood, baking bread, hookahs being smoked by round-bellied men. As he emerged into daylight by the Damascus Gate, he had decided to meet Bea. He was too intrigued not to.

  The American Colony was no distance. Its walled inner courtyard was cool, shaded with palms and perfumed by roses. Here sat diplomats, military men and political advisors from every camp, head to head in deniable discussions on this disputed seam between east and west Jerusalem. But of
Bea, there was no sign. He checked reception and the restaurant without success.

  McCall left after an hour, mightily puzzled. There was a short cut to his hotel, through a quiet road between apartment blocks with high-fenced gardens full of trees and bushes. He noticed two youngish men sitting on a stone wall in denim jeans and with red and white shemaghs around their faces. McCall was too preoccupied by thoughts of Bea to notice much else and passed without eye contact. But three paces further on and they stole up on him.

  At that same moment, a small delivery van also started its choreographed approach from behind. McCall half glanced to his left. There was only time to see the van’s sliding door being opened.

  Then his arms were grabbed and forced up his back as he was bundled face down into the van. Someone rammed the door shut. Someone else sat on him. Duct tape was wound round his mouth, eyes and hands. His Canadian injuries went agonisingly live again.

  The driver was already accelerating away, but gently – no screeching tyres, no dangerous manoeuvres for a witness to recall from the ten seconds it had taken for a man to disappear into the night.

  And into McCall’s disorientating pain and alarm came a memory out of nowhere... that Arie Minsky’s pals kidnapped Eichmann exactly like this. But then a needle went into McCall’s leg and nothing registered anymore.

  Chapter Thirty Six

  The road from Jerusalem to the lowest point on earth cuts through the dimpled brown hills where legend has Moses buried, passes by Bedouin camps all tethered with goats then heads down, down, down to the soupy, turquoise waters of the Dead Sea.

  The mountains of Jordan border the eastern shore, pinkish-purple in the salinated haze and to the west, rise the sheer cliffs of the Judean desert, a thousand feet above. They say the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah are submerged thereabouts, destroyed by a rain of burning sulphur when God judged their peoples immoral. Only stones and rocks remain, populated by darting lizards and tiny orange flowers, baking in the hamsin winds rolling in from the desert’s dry riverbeds like draughts from an oven.