by Vaseem Khan
‘Do I get any say in this?’
Be firm, she told herself. ‘No. I’m afraid my mind’s made up.’
‘Do you mean that others have made up your mind for you?’
The accusation wasn’t without merit. Unconsciously, she began to flick through the sheets again, struggling to frame her next words. ‘You don’t understand.’
‘So why don’t you explain?’
The words rushed out of her in a torrent. ‘Have you any idea what it’s like? Being me? Fighting the battles I fight each day? My life is a public spectacle, fair game for every hack in the country. For no other reason than because I’m a woman.’
Her fingers continued to turn the sheets, moving on to the papers Lindley had collected pertaining to Otto Skorzeny, Bruner’s former commander.
‘Can you imagine the field day they’d have if you and I . . .’ She froze.
The sheet beneath her fingers was the first page of Skorzeny’s service record. It included a photograph.
Shock rolled through her.
It couldn’t be.
‘Persis?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she breathed. ‘I have to go.’
She put down the phone, snuffing out his incipient protest.
Picking up the sheet, she stared at the page. A prickling sensation crawled over her scalp.
This was it.
The missing link.
Call it serendipity, call it blind luck. But the answer had fallen into her lap. Or at least, the shape of an answer.
She glanced at the clock on the wall. Almost ten.
Not too late.
Chapter 43
The building was rundown, seemingly held up by the two towers on either side of it, like a drunk. A maze of black cables criss-crossed the narrow spaces between the towers, some employed as washing lines. The front façade was weather-beaten, cracked by sun, pitted by rain, and marred by torn and faded Bollywood posters, stretching all the way to the top floor.
Many of the balconies had grills over them. On the second floor an elderly woman stared glumly down at her through the mesh.
There was no guard at the entrance, and no elevator. She hadn’t expected either.
She climbed five flights. A young woman in the stairwell on the fourth floor nursed a baby at her breast. Persis wondered why she didn’t do it in her apartment. And then the woman – no more than a girl, really – shifted on the concrete steps and Persis saw the swollen right cheek, and understood.
Standing before Flat 503, she hesitated.
What if she was wrong?
She knocked on the door.
Moments later, it swung back to reveal a small woman, in her twenties, dark-skinned and beautiful. She wore a sleeveless cotton nightgown, patterned with butterflies.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry to disturb you but I need to speak with your husband.’
The woman stared at her, suspicion gathering in her eyes.
Perhaps she should have worn her uniform.
‘My name’s Persis.’
Understanding dawned. And with it rage. Her jaw tightened. ‘You – you have the nerve to come here?’ She thrust a finger at her, stepping forward, forcing Persis to back-pedal. ‘Get out! Get out of here before I—’
‘Martha!’
The woman froze. Behind her appeared the towering figure of George Fernandes, clad in vest and shorts, with an infant asleep on his shoulder. The infant twitched but did not wake. Fernandes’s eyes widened as he caught sight of Persis. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘We need to talk.’
Martha seemed about to erupt again, but Fernandes cut her off with a look. He handed her the child. ‘Put him to bed.’
‘But—’
‘Martha. Please.’
She glared daggers at Persis, then retreated to a bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Fernandes ushered Persis in and waved at a sofa that had seen better days. The room was small, a third the size of her own living room. Fernandes seemed even larger in the space, a bear trapped in a cage.
She took the folder from under her arm, looked for a space on the cluttered coffee table to set it down. Fernandes pushed plates and toys to one side.
She lifted out Otto Skorzeny’s personnel sheet and set it on the table. Beside it, she laid down the photograph she’d found sewn into Ingram/Bruner’s jacket – Bruner fishing with Skorzeny.
The two photographs – of Skorzeny in his personnel file and Skorzeny fishing – were clearly of the same man, the only difference being that in the personnel photo the left side of the man’s face was visible – including the prominent scar running from the corner of his mouth to his ear.
‘This is Otto Skorzeny. A Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer – one of Hitler’s senior commandos. He ran a German intelligence agency called Abwehr. After the war, he supposedly ran an escape network for Nazis called the Spider.’
‘They call them ratlines,’ muttered Fernandes.
‘What?’
‘Nazi escape networks. I read that somewhere.’
She stared at him, wondering why people of her class so often underestimated those born into lesser circumstances. She’d never pegged Fernandes for a reader. ‘During the war, he was the commanding officer of the man who attacked me. James Ingram, real name: Matthias Bruner, a Nazi on the run. Skorzeny himself escaped from an internment camp two years ago.
‘On the way here, I stopped at Le Château des Rêves. I showed Jules Aubert the photograph and he confirmed that Skorzeny was the man they’d seen in there – Udo Becker – our Mr Grey. And Ingram was the “tall blond man” Skorzeny met with that evening.’
Fernandes sat back, realisation hitting him like an express train. ‘Are you saying that our investigations have led us to the same place? That we’re both looking for the same man?’
She nodded. ‘Bruner and Skorzeny came to Bombay for a reason. I believe they came here to steal the Dante manuscript. I think they convinced John Healy to help them. Or coerced him.’
‘How?’ asked Fernandes. ‘Healy was a famous man.’
‘I think they used the truth about Healy’s time in Italy against him.’
Quickly, she explained about John Healy’s falsified prisoner of war record and Belzoni’s allegations that the Englishman had been a collaborator during the war. ‘Matthias Bruner was the man who took Healy out of Vincigliata prison. I think that’s why Skorzeny asked him to take on this mission. I think Bruner supervised Healy during his time working for the Nazis.’
Fernandes allowed the new information to sink in. ‘But why? Why would they want to steal the manuscript?’
‘I don’t know. Whatever the reason, somewhere along the line, Healy had a change of heart. He hid the manuscript after stealing it, instead of handing it over to Bruner and Skorzeny. And then he left behind clues so that we could find it again. I think he hoped the delay – the time it would take us to unravel his clues and locate the manuscript – would be enough to scare the Germans away. They wouldn’t want to hang around in the light of such scrutiny.’
‘Why not just not steal it in the first place? If it mattered so much to him to keep it safe, why not just tell us there were Nazis out here trying to steal the damn thing?’
‘I guess he didn’t want to risk the truth about his own past coming to light. Being labelled a collaborator. I think he might also have worried that the Nazis would simply find someone else to do their dirty work if he refused them. He wanted to keep the manuscript out of their hands at any cost.’ She paused to organise her own thoughts, then pressed on. ‘This was a form of atonement, for helping them steal so many valuable manuscripts during the war. This one became a symbol. If he could just save Dante’s masterwork, perhaps he could go to his death absolved. In his own eyes, at least.’
Fernandes seemed to turn this over, inspecting it from all angles, then nodded. ‘And Francine Kramer?’
‘As her doctor told us, she thought she recognised Skorzeny when
he came to the nightclub. He must have visited the camp where she was imprisoned. Perhaps he even abused her while she was there. It doesn’t matter. He was a Nazi and for Francine that was enough. She invited him to her home to confirm his identity. Or perhaps she’d already made up her mind and just wanted revenge.’
‘You think she was planning to kill him?’
‘It’s possible. But she made a mistake. He saw through her and killed her.’
A sombre silence. ‘Skorzeny is still in the city, isn’t he?’ Fernandes said.
‘I don’t think he’ll leave without the manuscript.’
‘Which means you’re still in danger.’
She hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but Fernandes was right. Healy’s final clue was in her possession. If anyone was going to solve it, it was her.
Skorzeny would stay close, waiting for her to unravel the mystery.
Which meant that it was a good bet that he was following her, as Bruner had done.
And that meant that she – and she alone – had the chance to finish what Francine Kramer had begun.
When looked at it that way, she really had no choice at all.
Chapter 44
The hammering on the door pulled her blearily from sleep. Akbar made a soft protest at the back of his throat, then rolled spinelessly away, twisting the cotton sheet around himself.
It was her father. He glared at her from his wheelchair. ‘It’s a phone call. He says it’s urgent.’
She stumbled into the living room, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
The carriage clock said six-fifteen a.m.
The phone sat on a sideboard, beneath a photograph of her late mother, the receiver off its cradle. She picked it up.
‘Are you awake?’ It was Seth. Surprise moved through her. It was highly unusual for the SP to be alert and active this early in the day.
‘Is everything alright, sir?’
‘No,’ he replied stonily. ‘Everything is not alright. It’s about as far from bloody alright as it could be. The man you’ve been following around – the Italian, Belzoni . . . He’s turned up dead.’
Belzoni lived on the ground floor of a three-storey building just yards from Electric House, the former headquarters of the city’s electric supply, located near the Colaba Causeway. As a child, Persis remembered wandering around a showroom that had once been housed there, marvelling at a range of modern appliances while the sweating salesman tried to convince her sceptical father that electrical gadgets were the ‘wave of the future’.
Belzoni’s building was located on a side street, a narrow alley made narrower by trees and overhanging cable lines, blotting out the sun.
A police jeep was parked outside.
Beside it, she recognised Blackfinch’s latest transport.
The guard at the gate salaamed nervously as she walked past.
She found Seth and the Englishman in the bedroom, together with Blackfinch’s assistant, Mohammed Akram. Blackfinch was kneeling beside the bed, looking under it, while Seth’s attention was focused on Franco Belzoni’s corpse.
The Italian was trussed securely to a wooden chair in the corner of the room, head lolling forward on his chest. He wore only a pair of undershorts. His disarrayed hair flopped over his forehead. Blood smears ranged over his body; blood had also pooled at his feet, soaking into a thin rug.
Strange triangular marks, painfully red and raw, marred his chest. There was one on his right cheek, she saw.
Seth lifted his eyes. She saw that he’d lit a cigarette. It jittered in his fingers.
‘He was tortured. They used an iron on him.’
Her stomach inverted itself.
She looked back at the dead man, her thoughts returning to their last meeting. She realised that, despite Belzoni not having been entirely truthful with her, she’d come to like the Italian. The idea that he’d suffered such a torturous death, that anyone could have done . . . this to him . . . She exhaled deeply. ‘What killed him?’
Blackfinch stood up. He approached and handed her a pair of gloves. ‘Lift up his head.’
She pulled on the gloves, then did as he’d suggested, gently raising the Italian’s head.
Belzoni had been shot through the right eye. The socket was a pulped mess. Blood matted the back of his skull.
She lowered his face back on to his chest, took a deep breath, and stepped back.
Beside her, Seth made a coughing noise in his throat. She knew he rarely ventured out of Malabar House these days. He seemed naked without an office around his shoulders. Or a drink in his hand. The truth was she could use a stiff whisky herself about now.
‘Skorzeny,’ she breathed.
Seth looked at her curiously.
She brought him up to speed on developments, glad of something else to focus on. Blackfinch listened in, intently. The uncomfortable conversation from the night before kept intruding into her thoughts, but she pushed it away.
He was a big boy. He would have to deal with it.
When she’d finished, Seth sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed. He seemed to have shrunk. ‘It was bad enough having one Nazi running around the city, now you tell me there’s another one? And God only knows how many more, ready to crawl out of the woodwork.’ He waved his cigarette at Belzoni. ‘They tortured that poor bastard for a reason. What was it?’
‘I think Skorzeny’s been following me around. If that’s the case, he’ll know I’ve been meeting with Belzoni. He might even know Belzoni’s working for the Italian government. Perhaps he thought I told him somethi—’ She stopped as the implications of what she was saying hit her.
Was she responsible for Franco Belzoni’s death? Had she inadvertently given Skorzeny a reason to torture and murder the Italian?
A shudder moved through her.
‘You’re not to blame for this,’ murmured Blackfinch.
She looked up at him. His features were softened by the early light filtering in from the windows. If he was still upset about yesterday, he didn’t show it. There seemed only concern in his eyes.
Her expression hardened.
She didn’t need his pity. Or any man’s. ‘How was he able to walk in here, do this, and then walk out again without anyone realising?’
‘The guard at the gate says a man turned up late last night, claimed he was a friend of Belzoni’s. He was tall, dark-haired, scar on his cheek. Had a bottle of whisky with him. He left a couple of hours later. Gave the half-finished bottle to the guard.’
‘Such arrogance!’ Seth had risen from the bed, his face swollen with fury. ‘These – these animals think they can walk around my city, doing just as they please!’
‘This Skorzeny seems like a man of unusual boldness,’ observed Blackfinch. ‘I mean, a man that recognisable, on the run from any number of authorities, parading around as if he’s at the beach.’
‘I think that’s part of his persona,’ Persis said. ‘He’s managed to evade justice for so long, he actually believes himself to be invulnerable.’
‘Then that,’ said Blackfinch, ‘is how we’ll catch him.’
Chapter 45
Birla was asleep on his forearms at his desk. Beside him, Haq was chewing on a samosa. It was an article of faith at the station that Haq would always be eating, no matter the time. The man had the appetite of a bear.
She saw that George Fernandes was typing at his desk.
He nodded as she walked in and sat down heavily at her desk.
She sent Gopal scurrying for a glass of lime water.
Closing her eyes, she meditated on the case.
Things were coming to a head. It was anyone’s guess how the Italian government would react to the murder of Franco Belzoni. The man was an academic, a respected scholar. By rights, he should have been tucked away in a leafy university setting far from murderous Nazis. But he’d clearly agreed to work with Enrico Mariconti’s intelligence agency, SIFAR. He’d put himself in harm’s way, for a cause he believed in.
Why
? Were old manuscripts really worth a man’s life?
Belzoni had clearly thought so. He’d seen something noble in his mission, aiding in the recovery of stolen treasures for the Italian people. His people. He couldn’t have anticipated that his life would be cut short in the pursuit of that cause.
Murdered at the hands of a hardened killer.
She knew in her gut that Skorzeny wouldn’t flee the city. Not without the manuscript.
A thought occurred to her, and she sat up straight.
She’d shared Healy’s final clue with Belzoni. She had no doubt that the Italian would have told Skorzeny everything – it was only in the movies that men laughed at their torturers, daring them to do their worst. No man – or woman – could have endured the pain Belzoni had undoubtedly suffered.
Which meant that, in all probability, Skorzeny now had the riddle . . . What if he worked it out before she did?
Panic fluttered in her throat like a trapped moth.
She stood and called over the rest of the team. Haq nudged Birla awake. The pair, together with Fernandes, gathered around her desk.
She told them about Belzoni’s murder, and the connection to Otto Skorzeny, impressing on them the need to find the escaped Nazi.
Birla clicked his tongue in disgust. ‘Torture.’ He shook his head sadly. He walked back to his desk, returned with a copy of the Times of India, threw it on to her desk. ‘Healy’s death is all over the front pages. Everyone seems to have their own theory, the crazier the better. When they get hold of Belzoni’s murder and connect the dots, all hell is going to break loose.’
They stared glumly at the newspaper. It was early in the day, but they could imagine the hordes descending on them soon enough.
‘Then we don’t have much time to solve the puzzle, do we?’ she said, eventually.
Birla sighed. ‘How hard can it be to find one white man with a scar like that?’
‘Harder than you think. Skorzeny was an expert in espionage.’