A Place Of Strangers

by Geoffrey Seed

  It was near this place McCall was taken.

  ‘Why are you in Israel?’

  ‘I’m here to see some people.’

  ‘What people will you see?’

  ‘Why do you need to know?’

  ‘Why won’t you answer?’

  ‘Because it’s none of your damned business and I don’t know who you are.’

  McCall’s cussedness was not without risk but owed much to a broken body and the mother of all hangovers from whatever drug had knocked him out. His captors would not untape his eyes and hands, either – so he pissed himself like a child.

  ‘What is your interest in Mr Minsky?’

  ‘Hasn’t he told you himself?’

  His interrogator sounded young but was neither Arab nor Israeli. He spoke accented English though McCall couldn’t work out from where.

  ‘Why are you pursuing him?’

  ‘Let me go and I’ll tell you.’

  McCall’s hands and legs were tied to the wooden chair where he sat. The floor was cement hard. His voice echoed slightly, as if off a wall. He had to be in a building.

  ‘I have some advice for you, Mr McCall. Leave Israel. Forget all about Mr Minsky.’

  ‘And why should I do that?’

  McCall was answered with two punches to the face – quick and hard so his nose bled and his eyes watered and snot ran into his mouth.

  ‘Don’t try and be smart. Just do yourself a favour – leave well alone and fuck off while you still can.’

  Everything went quiet then a car started up and drove away. McCall was alone. Flies began settling on his bloody face. He could not bend low enough to shield himself from them or bear to worsen his migraine by shaking his head. It was another torture. He strained violently against the tapes around his wrists till they bled, too. His screams turned to sobs, his anger to self-pity.

  Maybe an hour passed before he heard a vehicle labouring across rough ground towards him. He was terrified that his kidnappers were coming back. But he started shouting anyway. Then two car doors slammed shut... footsteps came closer – and the tap, tap, tap of a walking stick.

  ‘Who is it? Who are you?’

  No one answered. McCall felt his hands and legs being cut free then a tearing pain as his blindfold was pulled off. The light was sudden and piercingly bright. It took a full minute before McCall could see his rescuers. Two men stood before him. One he had never seen before. The other was Arie Minsky.

  *

  Bea waited on the veranda of a cabin at kibbutz Ein Gedi, a few miles further south but still overlooking the Dead Sea. They grew peppers and avocados there, made the desert bloom with exotic flowers.

  It was Bea’s vision of paradise yet she dreaded the coming hour. The kibbutz paramedic drove up in his little open truck. Arie was crouched in the back where McCall was stretched out on a bundle of sacks.

  The two men laid him down indoors like a corpse from a cross for Bea to undress then bathe his hurts as only a mother could. She might have wept at how he looked – eyes swollen, face bruised yellow and caked with blood, body bent with hunger and all the injuries of his car crash aflame again. They gave him water and tablets to make him sleep. Bea stayed with him all day and all night. She never left his side.

  Minsky returned to Akko. McCall was best left alone with Bea for the present. He rested for much of each day.

  Bea brought his meals to where he sat in the garden – yoghurt, fruit, cold meats, cheese – and smiled her crooked smiles as his strength slowly returned.

  She said Evie was back in London but knew she would want to send love. McCall did not respond. Bea’s speech was becoming less jumbled but McCall didn’t really want to talk, not then – not until several days later.

  They were sitting beneath uncountable millions of stars, each a reminder of the smallness of human existence, of how little we know, still less understand.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth about my parents, Bea?’

  ‘Couldn’t... so hard.’

  ‘But I’ve remembered, you see.’

  ‘Wanted to... Mac, believe please.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you?’

  ‘Moment passed... older you were, truth more pain for you.’

  ‘So it was better I lived a lie?’

  ‘Did our best, Mac... believe, please.’

  He did... up to a point. Yet part of him would always feel tricked, as if something beyond value been taken from him. He had it back now – but only by accident and at a price. Bea still had many questions to answer.

  ‘Who kidnapped me? Who kidnapped me and why did they do it?’

  ‘Not know, Mac.’

  ‘Tell me the truth this time. It was Arie, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Cannot say. Please, cannot.’

  ‘I know about Arie and those Nazis who died.’

  ‘No, no, no – ’

  ‘And all about you... cheating on Francis.’

  ‘– no, no, no.’

  Bea stood up with both hands to her ears like a child not wanting to listen anymore. Then she locked herself in her bedroom. It is what Helen would have done if he had ever been given chance to confront her, too.

  *

  Arie Minsky returned to Ein Gedi next morning. On one level, McCall owed Minsky for freeing him. But how could he have known where McCall would be if he hadn’t put him there in the first place? Minsky survived behind Nazi lines, took years to hunt down his enemies and get away with murder. He had motives aplenty to throw a scare into McCall. But for now, they were locked in an uneasy stand off.

  ‘Feeling any better, Mac?’

  ‘A bit, yes. Thank you.’

  ‘I remember you in short pants... skinny little kid, always playing cowboys and Indians in Garth Woods.’

  Minsky smiled fondly to himself.

  ‘And now you’re the sheriff, after me for murder.’

  McCall’s stomach tightened. He was not ready for this, physically or any other way. Minsky looked a good two decades younger than his eighty odd years, lean and toned and tempered in fires which those who had experienced them would never forget.

  ‘We have much to discuss, Mac.’

  Minsky walked with him to a table beyond the kibbutz’s dining hall where the aerial roots of a Banyan tree formed a stockade against the fierce sun. Black and white wheatears dipped and drank in water spilling from a fountain of Egyptian porphyry. Here was peace. Minsky brought them omelettes, orange juice, baklava. He was a fastidious eater. No crumb was allowed to settle on his white shirt, no flake of pastry on his chin.

  ‘Whatever you think of me, Mac, you must go easy on Bea.’

  ‘In what way must I?’

  ‘You must never forget that most bereaved kids are good at convincing adults they’re fine because that’s what they think the adults want to hear.’

  ‘You mean it makes it easier for them?’

  ‘In a way, yes. But for Bea and Francis, where was the wisdom in making you retrieve something so terrible that your subconscious had already buried it?’

  The sound of the water fountain reminded McCall of the stream in Garth Woods, of Francis so burdened and betrayed, of innocence lost.

  ‘How could such a thing happen... my mother and father to die like that?’

  Arie Minsky hesitated, but only for a moment.

  ‘The newspapers said it was murder and then suicide.’

  ‘Half wrong – as usual.’

  ‘Well, only one person could ever say for sure what happened that day... ’

  ‘Yeah... I know that now. It was an accident. My father didn’t mean to kill her. He wasn’t a murderer... he didn’t have to kill himself.’

  Minsky nodded in agreement. But for McCall, this was not the only painful truth demanding to be confronted. Minsky told him about Edward McCall cracking up on a bombing raid with Francis and then being unjustly convicted of cowardice.

  ‘He’d been a hero till then, Mac... a hero to be broken on the wheel of war and humiliate
d as a warning to others. His life fell apart after that... he couldn’t take it.’

  Debts mounted, despite help from Francis. Edward and Elizabeth left Somerset and took their son to Devon. That is where the tragedy happened. Francis’s fake newspaper article was an attempt to redraw and soften his stepson’s history, to lay a false trail should McCall ever set out in search of his parents.

  ‘Never, ever forget, Mac – Bea and Francis acted in good faith, in your best interest as they saw it.’

  McCall listened to this new evidence as a juror might hear the family context of an appalling crime. Yet he knew nothing anyone could say anymore would fill the emptiness he still felt inside... the void where his mother and father should have been.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  ‘Come on, Mac, let’s take a trip into the desert... you and me.’

  ‘Without your goons this time?’

  ‘I haven’t got any goons.’

  ‘So who kidnapped me and how did you know where’d I’d be?’

  ‘Israel’s a small country. Not much happens here without certain people finding out.’

  ‘Then you’ll know who my kidnappers were?’

  ‘The question isn’t simply who, Mac... it’s why that’s more interesting.’

  They drove to Masada, a mountain fortress towering above the Dead Sea. Soldiers of Rome’s Tenth Legion laid siege to a band of Jewish fighters at Masada soon after the time of Christ. Faced with slavery or death, the rebels chose to put themselves to their own swords and Masada came to symbolise sacrifice and resistance against an oppressor.

  A steep path zig-zagged up through falls of scree and rock to the incandescent summit, fourteen hundred feet above. McCall should never have set out on such an arduous climb. He was too weak, the heat too fierce. McCall was all in – and was about to be tested further in such a place as the devil challenged Jesus to turn stone into bread..

  ‘So, Mac – let’s hear it, tell me about the evidence you’ve got against me.’

  McCall felt cornered... put up or shut up. There was no choice but to spell out what he had discovered of the suspicious deaths of the three Nazis in Bea’s photograph – Rösler, Frank and Virbalis – and the conspiracy he alleged she, Francis and Minsky were in.

  ‘Is that it, Mac? Is that all you’ve got?’

  ‘So it’s not true? It’s all a coincidence?’

  ‘Whether it is or it isn’t, you must know you’ll never fly that by a libel lawyer.’

  A group of off duty Israeli soldiers passed by with a guide, about to learn that survival never came without a butcher’s bill.

  ‘All right, I’ve heard you out now do you want to hear my side?’

  ‘Sure, Arie. I’d hate to think someone wanted me dead for no reason.’

  Minsky’s eyes hardened against him.

  ‘You need to listen and learn, my friend. Rösler died in a freak road accident. That’s not me saying it – the German police say it.

  “They also say that Wilhelm Frank got lost in those underground tunnels and starved to death. And here’s something you might not know but Yanis Virbalis committed suicide because he knew the Soviet authorities were making moves to extradite him from Canada to stand trial for war crimes in Lithuania.’

  ‘Then why did Francis film each of these men?’

  ‘He’s dead. We can’t ask him. But he took his camera everywhere. You know that.’

  ‘OK, then why do you appear in the footage of Rösler and Frank?’

  ‘My passport from then will show I was never in Germany, or Canada, either.’

  ‘But Bea and Francis were at the relevant times.’

  ‘Yes, on diplomatic postings of one sort or another – so what?’

  ‘But you worked with Virbalis, on the railways. You lodged across the street from him with old Miss Deware – ’

  ‘– a woman who’s been blind from birth. What a compelling witness she makes.’

  ‘How do you know she’s been blind from birth?’

  ‘I’m not obliged to tell you, Mac.’

  ‘So why was Bea giving a talk at the school that Virbalis’s daughter attended on the very night he supposedly committed suicide?’

  ‘Mac, Mac – first a blind witness, now an alcoholic... or had she sobered up by the time you left her bed?’

  Even in the desert, Minsky did not need to break sweat to outbox him.

  ‘Mac, whatever you think you’ve got, it’s going nowhere... is it?’

  Minsky’s whole manner changed then. He pushed back his curling, silver hair and placed a protective arm around McCall’s shoulder.

  ‘Let us not fall out about this. Come, let me show you the world from on top of Masada so you might see a few things about history that really matter.’

  They walked in silence through the roofless buildings where the rebels against Rome had lived and prayed, kept amphorae of wine, taken ritual baths and finally slaughtered themselves. The remains of a man and boy were found intact by that of a young woman, hair still in braids, dainty leather sandals at her feet, all preserved for two thousand years in the hot, dry air.

  Nearby were pyramids of huge stone balls, still waiting to be heaved down on an enemy long since gone to dust – just as those he sought to conquer.

  ‘That’s all they had back then, Mac... rocks. Rocks against a Roman legion.’

  Minsky leaned over the casemated walls and looked down on black, fan-tailed ravens wheeling over the wilderness that shimmered into the Negev desert.

  ‘You can’t report this on the BBC but we’re making nuclear bombs over there... a place called Dimona. We never admit it but those who would push us into the sea know about it... and I’m glad they do for we’ll not die like we did without price ever again.’

  Between Masada and Dimona had come the blood and ashes of the Holocaust. McCall still believed the three old Nazis died in revenge for some collective sin from that time – however hard Minsky tried to persuade him otherwise.

  And if McCall now understood how and why his first father came to be falsely called a murderer, it followed that he felt compelled to discover what had driven the second to actually become one. McCall would stick close to Minsky, whatever the risk to his health.

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  The cries of peacocks echoed back from the bare mountain escarpment beyond the kibbutz garden where Bea and McCall walked arm in arm through an aisle of palm trees to a bench in the shade.

  ‘Angry with me, aren’t you?’

  ‘No Bea, not about my parents... not anymore.’

  ‘Then about Francis and Arie?’

  ‘Yes, I am a little... you know I am.’

  They found a place to sit and Bea took McCall’s hand as she had on their very first walk, far away and long ago in the woods of Garth Hall. Time was a luxury she no longer had and not all her secrets should be buried with her.

  ‘We couldn’t child get, Mac... Francis, me.’

  ‘I know. It must have been so upsetting for you both.’

  ‘Like you and Helen.’

  ‘Except Helen did have a baby.’

  ‘Not yours, though.’

  ‘No, that’s true... it probably wasn’t mine.’

  ‘Same as me.’

  ‘But you didn’t have a baby.’

  ‘Not baby from Francis, no. Arie baby.’

  McCall withdrew his hand.

  ‘Minsky? You mean you had a baby with Minsky?’

  ‘Yes, Arie baby.’

  McCall stood up so he could look down upon her.

  ‘God, Bea. You did that to Francis as well?’

  He turned to leave but she pulled him back.

  ‘Listen me, Mac... please.’

  She began a disjointed account of how she had met Minsky in Prague then escaped from the Nazis only to miscarry their child and never be able to conceive again. Bea met and married Francis later but in those less enlightened times, she could not risk disgrace by confessing why she was barren – or that he
r love for Arie never died.

  ‘Price of sin, Mac... I paid much.’

  Then Francis and Minsky became friends. Francis came to accept his rival’s part in Bea’s life for he worshipped her unconditionally and just as she was – imperfectly adorable.

  ‘Francis didn’t judge me, Mac.’

  Maybe he didn’t. But McCall could not forget those childhood memories of Francis being too bereft to explain why Bea was missing from both their lives nor his last days when he had called her a witch. But there was nothing more to be said or done which would make a jot of difference any more.

  Bea now intended to stay in Israel for whatever span remained to her. She wanted nothing of England anymore. All that she had was now Mac’s. He thought about trying to comb her out some more about the dead Nazis but Minsky arrived before he could. Neither man had concluded his business with the other. They drove away in Minsky’s Volvo.

  McCall watched Bea in the wing mirror, waving, and getting smaller every moment.

  *

  Little was said in the hour or so it took to reach the hotel in Jerusalem where McCall should have stayed on the night he was abducted. He paid the overdue bill and retrieved his travel bag then joined Minsky for mint tea in a café by the Street of Sorrows.

  Minsky, open blue shirt, pale linen suit, had a foreign correspondent’s knack for knowing where best to get watered. McCall unzipped his bag. He could now even the score and produce his research – the notes, documents, pictures linking the suspicious deaths that Minsky so mockingly derided. He caught Minsky smiling.

  ‘Don’t waste your time, my friend. What you are looking for will not be there.’

  McCall tried not to panic. All the clothes and clutter from his empty bag lay on the table between them. But Minsky was right. The entire research file was missing.

  ‘OK, Arie. Where is it? Who’s got it?’