Mystery Man

by Bateman, Colin

  He might have been an old man, but he had the reflexes of a juggler.

  He set it on the counter, smiled and then offered his hand again.

  We shook. His grip was strong, his skin cold.

  'Thank you so much for seeing me,' he said.

  'My pleasure,' I replied.

  Neither of us volunteered our names. That itself was no indication of anything: bookselling could be a secretive business.

  He looked around the store. 'This is a nice shop,' he said, his accent thick. 'I thought we would be alone.'

  'Stock-taking,' I said, 'unavoidable, I'm afraid.' His eye lingered on DI Robinson. 'Another collector. Once he heard I was opening late, there was no stopping him. You guys are very persuasive.'

  He nodded. I became aware for the first time that there was a bulge in his jacket, his left inside pocket. My immediate conviction was that it was not a wallet. Knowing what I thought I knew about him, I thought I knew what it was.

  'No matter,' he said.

  If he made even the slightest move for his gun I would have the cleaver out and plunged into his chest. Attack is the best form of defence. If it turned out to be a wallet I wouldn't get many marks for customer service, but at least I would be alive.

  I had dismissed the possibility of him carrying out a massacre – but I suddenly thought . . . why? Three people were dead already. Another four wouldn't make much difference. You may as well be shot for a whole flock of sheep as a lamb.

  'I wanted to show you something,' he said.

  He began to reach inside his jacket.

  Everything went into slow motion.

  My hand was back on the cleaver, but I just couldn't move it. Instead I heard myself saying: 'Is there anything else I can help you with, Detective Inspector?'

  There was no reaction from the old man at all other than to delve deeper into his jacket pocket, all the time his eyes boring into me.

  'No, fine here thanks,' said DI Robinson.

  The old man didn't care who he killed.

  I had to do it. I had to do it now.

  Now!

  Stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab . . . !

  But I still could not move. Alison, Jeff, DI Robinson, none of them were any use, none of them realised what was happening, none of them were close enough to stop this old man producing his weapon.

  His . . . small, crumpled, leatherbound book.

  'Oh my,' I said, 'oh my oh my.'

  He nodded. He thought it was an expression of appreciation instead of one of utter relief.

  Unless he was going to poke me in the eye with it, I was safe.

  I quietly set down the cleaver.

  'I was wondering if there might be any value to this?'

  I took the volume from him and gingerly opened it. It was a Bible. In German. But written inside the cover, in pencil, was:

  Auschwitz 1944

  Christ! He was playing with me. There was a cold sweat on my back, but not as cold as this guy: a Nazi, profiteering sixty-plus years down the line, the Bible's true owner mangled in a mass grave. I had both hands on the book, a thousand miles from my cleaver.

  'Very nice,' I managed to whisper. 'How did you come by it?'

  He gave a little shrug. 'I do not like to talk about it.'

  There was complete and utter silence in No Alibis. Even the clock on the wall above Columbo seemed to have stopped.

  From his position on the floor, bending over a box of books, Jeff said quietly, 'We have ways of making you talk.'

  The Nazi turned. He put a hand to his ear. 'I am sorry . . . my hearing is not so good . . . what did you say . . . ?'

  I did not wish Jeff to be shot through the head merely for being an idiot. I stepped in, the distraction somehow enabling my voice to recover. 'He said, we sometimes need to talk about a rare book, how you came by it, establish its provenance – it helps with the valuation. This obviously has some historical significance . . .'

  'Ja, ja,' he said. 'I do not wish to sell. For insurance purposes, no?'

  I nodded. I turned the book over in my hand. Despite being small, it was surprisingly weighty. The edges of the pages were flecked with gold. All I knew about gold in the camps was that fillings had been ripped from the mouths of both the living and the dead.

  'Well,' I said, 'we specialise in mystery fiction, our rare editions are really all in that genre, but if you give me a few minutes I could check its value on the web.'

  He studied me. 'That would be very helpful, thank you. The web, I do not understand!'

  He smiled. False teeth. False smile.

  I indicated the shelves behind him and said, 'Perhaps you might find something that appeals, while I do this . . . ?'

  The Nazi surveyed me for a long moment before nodding and turning to study my books. I glanced at Alison, now standing in the kitchen doorway. She raised her eyebrows. I gave her a helpless gesture. Jeff was also looking at me. He showed me his fist and gave a slight nod. Do you want me to give him a dig?

  What to do?

  What did his giving me the Auschwitz Bible mean? Was it a warning? A precursor to extreme violence, or was he saying, I know who you are and what you've been doing; if you continue you will end up just like the others? Why give a warning at all? Was it because we weren't alone? No – he had brought the Bible with him, so perhaps the warning was preplanned. Or was it his cover story, to get into the shop, to buy him time to work out how he was going to kill me and make his escape undetected?

  As all this pinballed through my brain he reached up to a high shelf to lift down a book. In stretching, his bare arm emerged from both his jacket sleeve and shirt cuff and for the briefest moment I saw, tattooed on the inside of his forearm, a series of half-faded numbers.

  My mouth dropped open.

  Oh . . . my . . . God . . .

  'Excuse me,' I said. The man turned. His face was grey and his eyes baggy. 'Were . . . were you actually in Auschwitz? I, uh, couldn't help notice your . . .'

  I tapped my own arm. He looked puzzled for just a moment, and then laughed suddenly. 'Ah!' he said, coming back to the counter. 'My true identity is exposed!'

  It didn't mean that he wasn't the killer, but suddenly everything seemed different, lighter. I relaxed the grip I had renewed on the meat cleaver.

  He stood before me and pulled his sleeve up again, studied the number briefly, before allowing it to fall back into place. 'It was a long time ago. In that place, we were not allowed books. We were not allowed anything. But somehow, there were books. They were our escape. Ever since I have loved books. This Bible, I brought out with me. To remind me.' He nodded at me for several moments. I didn't know what to say. Alison crossed to the counter and stood beside me. 'This is your wife, no?' he asked.

  'No,' I agreed.

  'Not yet,' said Alison. She put her hand out. 'I'm Alison.'

  As they shook, his eyes moved to me. 'I am sorry, I should have introduced myself properly, earlier. But I wanted to see what type of a man you were, this bookseller who would do my wife such a kindness.'

  'Your . . .'

  'My wife is Anne Smith. Anne Mayerova. I understand you may have saved her life.'

  30

  As soon as Mark Smith – Mark Mayerova – left No Alibis, I stood in the front window and waved frantically across the road, trying to catch the attention of the steeks in order to stop them following the old man. They were both clearly the worse for wear. Each had a plastic bag clamped to his face. They moved round in hazy circles, giggling. One of them spotted Mr Mayerova, and prodded the other, who prodded back. One of them looked towards the shop and saw me, and I made a cutting motion across my throat and immediately regretted it as he began to check his pockets for his favourite knife. I moved to the door and looked along the footpath to my left, just in time to see Mr Mayerova climb into the back seat of a Jaguar about twenty yards away. As it began to pull out it braked suddenly as the two steeks threw themselves across its bonnet.

  Then they rolle
d off the other side and lay on the ground laughing.

  The Jaguar blasted its horn once, then slid smoothly away.

  My Botanic Avenue Irregulars were completely useless. In the morning they would remember nothing about the incident, apart from having a vague recollection that I owed them money.

  I withdrew to the relative safety of the shop. DI Robinson was now at the counter with his selections. He had chosen W.R. Burnett's The Asphalt Jungle from 1950 and Jim Thompson's The Grifters from 1963. They were good picks, but it would be hard not to in my shop. I gave him a decent price and we played the old receipt game again.

  He said, 'I couldn't help overhearing some of that. Must make you feel good when someone comes in and thanks you. My game, you only ever hear complaints.'

  My exchanges with Mark Mayerova had been quite vague, and he had spoken relatively quietly. The two had combined to give the detective only a rough idea of what we'd been talking about, and no indication at all that the case had anything to do with the murder of Malcolm Carlyle.

  So DI Robinson went on his way, asking to be kept up to date about any future sales, and pretty soon after that I let Jeff go as well. He was looking thoughtful. He had listened mesmerised to the old man as he talked about life inside the camp, about being separated from his wife, and the joy of their reunion back in Czechoslovakia after the war. Each had been told that the other was dead. With all the chaos at the end of the war, getting back to Prague had been something of a nightmare – yet they both managed to arrive at their old apartment within hours of each other.

  That left just me and Alison.

  I said, 'You had tears in your eyes.'

  'I love a good love story.'

  'Usually someone dies in a love story.'

  'You're a real the-glass-is-half-empty kind of a guy, aren't you?'

  'I'm a realist.'

  'Do you think you could have survived a death camp for me?'

  'No.'

  'Well that's about right. You wouldn't have survived five minutes. You would have freaked when you discovered they didn't serve frappuccino.'

  'I wouldn't have been in a death camp. I would have been in the resistance.'

  She laughed. 'Yes, you would. Conan the Librarian.'

  I raised an eyebrow. She raised one back. It was like high-stakes poker, with eyebrows.

  'What are you going to do now?'

  'Think,' I said.

  'About?'

  'The Case of the Dancing Jews.'

  'You mean it's back on?'

  'It was never really off.'

  'Well I'd love to join you,' she said, 'but I've work to do.'

  'At this hour? I thought we might discuss . . .'

  She shook her head. She wanted to get drawing. Mayerova's story had inspired her and she wanted to get something down on paper while it was still fresh. I was mildly disappointed but also pragmatic. It wasn't as if she was swanning off with someone else. Yes, I did want to think about the case. But I also wanted Alison to myself. I wanted to pull the shutters down and talk about concentration camps and murder and the who, what, where, when and how of it all with her. But it wasn't to be. Instead, before she left, she kissed me deeply.

  That means, with tongues.

  I was in shock.

  I sat behind the counter, shutters down, light on. My mind kept flitting back to Mark Mayerova, and his wife, and how romantic it all was and how right Alison was: I was a glass-half-empty kind of a guy, and maybe I should take a leaf out of her book and try to look on the bright side. But then the more I thought about it the more I thought, maybe not. Mark Mayerova and his wife had survived the war, they had moved to Northern Ireland, and then after forty years of marriage and two grown-up children they had split up. He hadn't gone into why, and he clearly retained a lot of feelings for her, but it was another practical example of why I was perfectly right to gravitate towards misery. Things always fell apart. It was the nature of life. And death.

  I took out a notebook. Beside the serial number that had been tattooed on Anne Mayerova's arm, I wrote her husband's serial number. I had only seen it for a few moments, and the ink was badly faded, but I have become an expert at memorising such sequences. So I now had two concentration camp numbers: it hardly constituted a collection, but at least there was a finite number of them. How much more interesting to find a pattern in those numbers than in the ever-expanding universe of car registrations.

  I also wrote down the licence plate number of his Jaguar.

  It was MM3.

  Personalised.

  In a way he had an excuse for it, unlike all those other posers. In the camps almost every facet of life had been designed to remove individuality and personality, to impose anonymity; they had reduced everyone to a number. His personalised number plate was just one way of telling the world that even when a government imposed a number on him, he was determined to stand out.

  He was a good talker – spare with his words, but the ones he chose had been evocative. He was obviously grateful for what I'd done on behalf of his wife and didn't seem to think that we were wrong to be concerned for her safety. The Odessa, he said, was a very real organisation, and even though he had not heard of it being active in recent years, it might very well still be. But he certainly couldn't throw any light on what his ex-wife's big secret might be.

  'And perhaps now we never will know,' he had said, with a sad shake of his head. 'She really is not well. The periods when she is lucid, they grow shorter and shorter.'

  'We were lucky then,' I said. 'Hearing her story first-hand.'

  He looked at me for a while. 'Sometimes,' he said, 'I think it should all be forgotten. We saw too many things.'

  I asked him if he thought she would be able to attend the launch of her book, and he seemed surprised that it was happening at all. 'I had thought they had decided not to publish.'

  'No, no – the publisher has bounced back. He sees it as a bit of a tribute to his dead . . . his missing wife. But it should be a good night. If Anne can't make it, you should absolutely come in her place, perhaps say a few words?'

  Mr Mayerova nodded slowly. 'Perhaps, perhaps. Though what I know about dance - very little!'

  He chuckled.

  It was only after he'd gone that I realised he'd left his Auschwitz Bible behind. I had a phone number for him: he said he could never remember his home number, but if I looked up Smith Garages in the Yellow Pages one of his sons would pass on any updates I had on the launch of I Came to Dance.

  'I came here in 1946,' he said proudly, 'and with what little money I had I bought a car. Sold it the same day and made a nice profit. Been doing it ever since. But I only work one day a week now – the boys think I . . . how do you say it . . . cramp their style?'

  So I could have phoned him. But did not. The Bible was probably worth a few thousand pounds, but twice that wouldn't make up for even half of the stress I'd experienced because of The Case of the Dancing Jews.

  I would deny all knowledge.

  We book-collectors have an expression: finders keepers, losers weepers.

  Not long after ten o'clock I switched off the computer and the lights in the front of the shop, and took my empty Diet Pepsi can and Twix wrappers into the kitchen. If I'm working late, and particularly in the summer months when it's still bright, I slip out the back way and down the alley to the No Alibis van. I had a box of books under one arm and a bag of rubbish for the bins in the other. I'd just dumped the rubbish and was turning into the alley proper when a voice to my left said, 'Hey.'

  I turned into a blur of movement and a sudden impact on my left cheek. I flew backwards, books in the air, and landed hard on the glass-strewn lane. Knees thumped into my back, pinning me to the ground, and a hand pushed my face roughly into the gravel.

  'Got you now,' the same voice hissed.

  I was so stupid. I'd protected myself against a perceived threat just a few hours before, only to discover it was a harmless old man. And now I was alone, and walking dange
rous back alleys without a care in the world, and suddenly the real killer had me. He had just bided his time until he could get me alone to finish me off.

  But it is never too late to beg.

  'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . . please don't . . . please don't hurt me . . . please don't . . . I'm sorry . . .'

  'You will be, you fucking . . .'

  The load lightened, for just a moment, and then I was flipped over on to my back. He sat on me again. A rough-looking character, younger than me, his eyes fired up, his face thunderous, his breathing adrenaline-fuelled. No obvious German accent, but that meant nothing. Probably he was a master of accents and disguise and surprise and death. His fist closed again, but as he aimed another punch at me I cried out: 'Please don't! Not my face! I'm a haemophiliac! If you break my nose they won't be able to stop the blood!'

  He hesitated for just a moment, which I took to be a good sign, before redirecting the punch to my arm. But before he could land it I cried, 'Please don't! I have brittle bones! They'll never be able to repair it . . .'

  Again he delayed. 'Shut your fucking mouth!'

  'I can't,' I cried, 'I have verbal diarrhoea . . .'

  It was a whine too far. He punched me in the chest. He slapped me in the face, my head moving left, right, left again as the slapping continued. Tears in a grown man are not particularly cool, but I had no option. I was not in a position of strength.

  'Please, I'm really sorry . . .'

  He pulled me up by my shirt collar. 'What're you sorry for?' he demanded.

  'Everything!' And I meant it. It was about survival. Everything covered everything. 'I don't care what you did or what your secret is, I don't care about the war or the camp or what happened . . . just don't kill me. I just sell books, I can keep my mouth shut, I—'