A Place Of Strangers

by Geoffrey Seed

  ‘If you’d have played this game as long as me, you wouldn’t even have to ask.’

  ‘Look, I’ve been kidnapped and beaten up and now my stuff’s been stolen – ’

  ‘– keep calm, Mac.’

  ‘How the hell can I when you’re having me over like this?’

  McCall raged inside, not just at Minsky but at his own stupidity. He should have had copies made of everything and put somewhere safe.

  ‘What’s missing is proof of nothing, Mac. It’s neither here nor there that it’s gone.’

  ‘But Francis set me on all this. Francis left me the clues.’

  ‘Dear, dear Francis. He killed thousands of Germans, you know... bombed them to blazes, innocent or guilty. His mind must have got so mixed up in the end.’

  ‘By what, Arie?’

  ‘Oh, you know... love, grief, remorse. All the usual regrets that keep the old from their sleep. Come, McCall. Let me show you what keeps me from mine.’

  *

  They drove towards the coast in silence, to a museum of the nearly indescribable. It was closed but Minsky knew how to have any door opened. Inside was cool and dimly lit for what was on show was alien to the light of day.

  Huge photographs were suspended on boards from the ceiling, blow-ups of people and places to guide the visitor through a brief moment in time, from the ghettoes to the gas chambers.

  Lodz, Bialystok, Warsaw, Vilna... Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Treblinka, Chelmno.

  So it went on... snapshots from the world’s end. A child might hold a doll, a woman a fur coat or an elderly man a string bag with all his life inside it. In their faces could be fear or hope. But naked at the edge of the pit, they would all look the same. They would all burn.

  Minsky stood in front of a cast iron door salvaged from a death camp furnace. He put the outstretched fingers of his right hand to its rough blackness, as if to commune for a moment with all those whose lives it had shut out. Alongside was a large map showing areas the Nazis had made Juden frei by 1944. A slab of metal, a piece of paper. Nothing connected to everything.

  The only sounds were their footsteps, the tapping of Minsky’s walking stick, the distant air-con. No clock was needed here. Time was on hold forever. They paused by a hill of shoes – men’s, women’s, children’s. All sizes, all colours, lace-ups, button-sided, slip-ons, sandal-strapped. Here were artefacts from a world as archaeologically lost as Masada and its skeletons.

  Minsky turned one over in his hand... a tiny, calf leather bootee, white going yellow and as soft as the skin of the baby who would have worn it. McCall stared across at Minsky, suddenly grown very old.

  ‘That’s the infinite cruelty for visitors to this place, McCall – never knowing whose child or wife or parents wore this or touched that...’

  Minsky closed his eyes and put the little shoe to his face to breathe in all that it was, all that it meant, for he had nothing else to hold onto.

  ‘Try to imagine, McCall... all that hatred in your head, eating away at you like a cancer. How would you deal with it?’

  ‘I can start to understand someone’s anger, the desire to have revenge for a great wrong but then to scheme and plan for it over several years and kill in cold blood... well, that’s a rare form of hatred – ’

  ‘– but not unknown.’

  ‘Maybe so but if a Jew murdered some old Nazi this way, it’d be wrong but people might understand why. What’s harder to figure out would be a non-Jew’s motivation.’

  ‘Well, hypothetically, let us say such a person, a woman for instance, lost a child and blamed the Nazis for her loss and so strongly did she psychologically identify with the suffering of Jewish mothers that there was nothing she wouldn’t do to hold those responsible to account.’

  ‘But Arie, what if this fictional woman needed her non Jewish husband to help her? Why would he act outside the law and take such a risk?’

  ‘Because the deepest love between people is a complex and uniquely powerful.’

  They left the museum’s necrotic imagery and drove up the Mediterranean road to Akko. It was into the sea off Israel that the ashes of Adolf Eichmann were dumped after he was hanged and the ghosts of those they had just left behind could rejoice. McCall said he had been told Minsky played a part in Eichmann’s capture.

  ‘No, that’s just gossip. I was never there.’

  ‘No? Ah, well... but if nothing else, Eichmann proves it’s better to put someone on public trial than to bump them off in some dark corner.’

  ‘In the case of Eichmann, I agree. To see him in his glass cage before the Jewish people and Jewish judges was hugely symbolic. It proved the Nazis had failed to destroy us. But not all the cases were like Eichmann’s.’

  *

  McCall knew he was being emotionally softened up by Minsky. They walked the length of Akko’s defensive sea walls, by the groin-vaulted passageways of the old town where Venetians, Pisans and Genoese quartered themselves with Jews and Arabs long before the violent coming of the Templars and Teutonic Knights of the Crusades. Old blood, bad blood. It lustrated the very stones they trod.

  ‘You must believe one thing, Mac... I was not born to be a killer. Parts of my life I regret most bitterly but I had no choice. I was caught up in the war, in events without precedent and these made me the man I became in a world where it was barely possible to remain human when everything around us had become so inhuman.’

  McCall did not reply. Minsky’s words felt like a plea of mitigation to a court in which the context of a crime was being heard before the offence itself.

  And so Minsky began to tell McCall the story of what had happened to his wife and children and sister amid the trees and picnic places of Ponar. His source was a neighbour from Vilna who survived against all the odds, someone who knew his family – and who also found out the identity of a man in the SS killing squad which had exterminated everyone Minsky loved.

  ‘That man’s name, McCall... it grew like a tumour in my guts until it consumed everything I was. I had to find him and I didn’t care how long it took or what methods must be employed. I would find that man and I would bring him to my justice.’

  ‘And did you get him, Arie?’

  ‘Eventually, many years later, yes... with the help of some good people and friends who knew the trials in Nuremberg could never settle all our outstanding debts.’

  ‘So you confronted this SS man?’

  ‘In his garage, yes... and he was given a choice. He had the addresses of his former comrades and we had some petrol and a lighter.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘You will get no admissions from me, McCall... it is enough to say the SS man understood the terms of the deal he was being offered and we got what we wanted.’

  ‘So you didn’t have to burn him alive?’

  ‘No, we resisted that temptation but we went back later and some adjustments were made to his car and he apparently drove to hell that way instead.’

  ‘Christ, Arie. This was Rösler, wasn’t it? Jakob Rösler – ’

  ‘Who is to say, McCall... though such a man was at Ponar and such a man took lots of photographs of his brave comrades going about their daily work.’

  ‘And such a man died in a car crash, didn’t he?’

  ‘I cannot say, I wasn’t there.’

  ‘But Wilhelm Frank and Yanis Virbalis were in that same SS squad, weren’t they?’

  Minsky just shrugged. He would make no more admissions, however oblique.

  ‘I wonder, Arie, if the deaths of any of these Nazis eased your own personal pain or brought back a single one of the six million who died.’

  ‘No... it did neither.’

  ‘So it was all pointless... the most Pyrrhic of victories.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Then why are you telling me any of this now?’

  ‘Because you’ve no corroboration for anything I’ve said. I could be making it all up. I’m not going on camera or putting my name to any quotes for you.’


  ‘And I’m not going to get my research file back, am I?’

  ‘They’ll make me Pope before that happens.’

  McCall knew he had been out manoeuvred by an infinitely wilier opponent.

  ‘But I’ve still got all the footage Francis shot if I wanted to use it.’

  ‘Really? Then I must give you my address in Rome.’

  ‘You mean that will have been stolen, too?’

  ‘Not by me, Mac. Get that into your head.’

  ‘Then who?’

  ‘You won’t want to know this but there’s something at my house you must see first.’

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  The basement in Minsky’s house doubled as a bomb shelter in case of rocket attack from Lebanon or Syria or an enemy who thought Hitler’s work unfinished. In his heart, Minsky wearied of war. He wished only to die in his bed, far from the saps and trenches of the front line wherein all his days had been spent.

  That was possible now – but on Bea’s terms. She said McCall had been through enough and was owed the truth... or as much of it as Minsky felt able to impart. So the two men sat in a windowless room of books on military conflict and politics and pictures of Minsky meeting army generals or alongside tanks or with pilots who had just ruined somebody’s day. This was an old man’s territory, full of memories but no plans.

  ‘As soldiers, we were always taught to obey orders – ’

  It was enough now for McCall to sit quiet and sip the iced water he had been given.

  ‘– but always had the poet in me... thinking for myself, not really a team player. From the thirties onwards, I was in the Jewish underground then the war came and I fought with the British only to turn against them to end British rule in Palestine. We wanted those Jews who’d escaped the Holocaust to come to Palestine but the British wouldn’t allow it and the man we came to blame for this was your Foreign Secretary back then, Ernest Bevin. You’ve heard of him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, I was sent to London to kill Bevin.’

  The headline brevity of Minsky’s confession was meant to shock. And it did.

  ‘But Bevin didn’t get assassinated.’

  ‘No. I thought my orders were bad politics so I sabotaged the plan.’

  ‘How could you do that?’

  ‘By then I knew Francis and we came to an arrangement. I gave him Bevin’s life.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I gave him Bevin’s life.’

  ‘In return for what?’

  ‘First, we Jews avoided creating a whole lot more enemies which is what would’ve happened if I’d assassinated a big European politician. Then Francis agreed to give me a bit of unofficial help on something else.’

  ‘I don’t follow. What could he help you with?’

  ‘A little bit of rat catching.’

  Everyone gained. Francis edged up Whitehall’s greasy pole, Minsky’s family was avenged, Bevin kept breathing. The cost – a few worthless lives snuffed out. The arithmetic did not offend men whose generation counted deaths in millions.

  ‘So you’re saying Francis was implicated... and by inference, Bea, too?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing that can be proved or quoted, Mac. But if you want to know who’s stolen your material then look no further than the mourners at Francis’s funeral.’

  ‘They were just old men – ’

  ‘– who were Francis’s friends and old colleagues. They’d prefer their secrets died with them rather than be exposed on television, don’t you think?’

  McCall thought immediately of steely Edgar Fewtrell who had heard the evil at Nuremberg and of some of the other pensioners at the graveside, tied till death to the black life of Intelligence.

  ‘But why would Francis film everything and leave evidence to implicate you all?’

  ‘Positive identifications of the Nazis would’ve been needed first, wouldn’t they? Then I guess Francis wanted some insurance against me. I’d have done the same in his position.’

  Minsky went to a cupboard and took out a video cassette.

  ‘Anyway, it’s academic now, Mac. When you get home, the chances are someone will have done a little housekeeping in the dacha.’

  McCall’s head went into his hands.

  ‘...so I’m afraid you’ll always be stuck between what you know and what you can show.”

  Minsky slotted the tape into his recorder and dimmed the lights.

  ‘This won’t help you much but Francis sent it to me when his crisis of conscience began to affect him and we started to worry what he’d do next.’

  We all conk out some time, Arie, and I find myself doing a bit of cleaning up after myself and the mess I’ve made of things in my life, not just the war, though God knows how I’ll explain myself at the Pearly Gates... no, it’s afterwards that’s bothering me. I’m ashamed, shouldn’t have done what I did... gone along with it for as long but the truth was whatever Bea wanted, Bea got. I wouldn’t have denied her the moon on a stick if she’d asked for it but I want you to take care of her when the time comes. She loved you more... I’ve always known that. I want you to look out for young Mac, too. I’m leaving him a few clues about what’s nagging at me but there are still people around who’ll not want him to succeed. He’ll come to you for guidance in due course so please don’t turn him away. He is my son and you must treat him as such for all this has cost me my peace of mind. I think that’s everything I need say so mark my words and find a god to pray to for forgiveness before it’s too late.

  Francis stared hard into the camera then moved out of shot. Minsky removed the tape.

  ‘You’ll not need me to tell you this, Mac, but Francis was the most ethical and moral of men. It was Francis who put a stop to what had been going on.’

  ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘After Canada, he felt it was all wrong and just like you, he said it wasn’t bringing a single victim back to life. I’ve told you already. Men like Francis and me, we weren’t born to be killers. We were made to become so.’

  ‘Did Bea agree to call a halt?’

  ‘Not immediately but what Francis was saying got to us. The emptiness of it all... the brutality. I knew the scales would never balance, even if I drowned in the blood of all those I held responsible. That’s the truth of it... and that’s the price I’ll pay till the day I die.’

  *

  A pair of jet fighters spun over Minsky’s house towards the border with Lebanon, drowning out the cooing collared doves in his aloe trees. McCall was alone in the garden trying to unpick Francis’s motives, to make sense at last of why he had willed him his fragmented story.

  Francis could have been exacting revenge on a faithless wife or using McCall as an instrument of jealously to harm the real tenant of Bea’s heart from beyond the grave. But that ran counter to everything McCall knew about a man he loved. Francis was trying to atone. McCall was sure of it.

  And in his gathering dementia, he conflated one guilt with another – that for incinerating all those unseen German civilians with the greater personal burden of conspiring with Bea and Minsky to bring about the deaths of three men without the moral or legal justification of war. In the end, what did it amount to but murder? What else but madness was its punishment?

  Minsky suggested a drink in a bar on the waterfront. The setting sun gilded the ocean and lit the little triangles of sail cloth heading back to port. Sea birds fell from the evening sky and came amongst the honey-stoned houses of Akko’s old town. A church bell rang the hour and children were called indoors. Cats fought, dogs barked and the sea sucked at the rocks below.

  Insofar as McCall knew his story now, he was becoming reconciled to never telling it. Any public interest was far outweighed by personal harm. Rosa Virbalis had been right. So had the old cop in Oberammergau.

  Minsky carried a dish of olives and bread and two glasses of beer to their table. They toasted each other – not as friends but as combatants coming to a truce.

 
‘Arie, you must tell Bea not to worry. Your story isn’t going to come out. I’ll only mention it to Evie and her job’s keeping secrets so it’ll go no further.’

  Minsky set his glass down on the metal table between them.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother doing that, McCall. Evie knows everything already.’

  ‘So Bea’s told her, has she?’

  ‘You really are still concussed, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’

  Minsky leaned forward and took McCall’s hands in his own.

  ‘It was Evie who traded you in, my friend.’

  ‘Evie... ?’

  ‘Yes... how else could the mourners have got into you?’

  ‘No, no, you’re wrong, Arie. She wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘I’m afraid Evie has other loyalties, Mac.’

  ‘Look, Evie’s coming to live with me... in Garth. That’s the plan. Honestly. We’re setting up home together directly I get back.’

  ‘Listen, Mac. Evie’s got a husband... he teaches history at University College.’

  ‘No, she’s had boyfriends, but – ’

  ‘– Evie’s moved back in with him. His name’s Phillip, lives in Clapham. Her flat’s already been re-let.’

  McCall stared back at him blankly. He suddenly felt Evie’s kiss on his cheek. Then a great sadness and a sickness for home swept over him. He wanted to be away and out of this foreign place, to be far from its lies and to be beneath the trees of an ancient wood where the wind blew and the water ran and the spirits of childhood might return him to all those secret places he had lost. Arie Minsky understood this and held McCall as a father might, close and tender, for he more than anyone else in the world knew that neither of them would ever find their way there again.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen