The Darkest Hour

by Tony Schumacher

Koehler took a drag of his cigarette and then reached across so that he could whisper. As he drew close, smoke escaped from his mouth and nose, like a dragon at rest.

  “You are here because you are lying. Now, we know you were in the warehouse last night, we know there was a gunfight, and I know Sergeant Rossett did that to your face. You aren’t going home, my friend. You are in hell.” Koehler tilted his head, trying to meet the eyes of the prisoner, who carried on staring at the table. “Four feet away are two men who are going to torment you terribly. If I am honest, I think the whole affair will be a dreadful waste of time. Because I know you are just a foot soldier, doing your best for your country. I know you don’t know much of the bigger picture, and I know that torturing you won’t do any of us much good—­especially you. The best we will get is some names of your commanders, and, more than likely, the names they’ve told you are false anyway, so the whole thing will be pointless. Why not tell me what you know, and spare yourself the harm that is going to come your way?”

  “I was just on my way to work . . .”

  Koehler leaned back in his chair, dismissing the rest of Hunter’s statement, and took another drag before folding his arms and studying the prisoner. He sighed and looked at Schmitt, and then back to Hunter, before shrugging.

  “Well, my friend, I tried.” Koehler sighed, took another drag on the cigarette, then stubbed it out on the back of Hunter’s hand.

  Chapter 39

  ROSSETT WOKE UP with a start, sucking in air and half arching his back. He gasped again, blinking up at the stained gray ceiling that stared back. He breathed deeply and wondered when the last time was that he hadn’t been snatched from sleep by the panic of nightmares.

  There was a hazy sunshine coming through the dirty gray net curtain that hung halfheartedly across the window, and it warmed his face, causing him to shiver when he realized how cold the rest of his body was.

  He shifted to look down at Jacob, who lay on the bed next to him. The boy’s head rested in the crook of Rossett’s arm, so that he was unable to move it.

  He stared at Jacob for a moment or two and realized he didn’t remember falling asleep. He twisted to look out the window and estimated the time to be about midday, maybe a little later. Deep inside him, his stomach gave a little rumble of hunger.

  He lifted his free arm and looked at where his watch had been, then remembered that one of the resistance had taken it when they first took him into the warehouse, along with his wallet and warrant card. That was before they had hooded him and dragged him to the cell.

  It had been a long night, a very long night.

  He looked at Jacob again and then wondered where Chivers was. Slowly, half an inch at a time, he eased his arm from under Jacob’s head and slid out from under the boy until he was sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his forehead. Jacob was lying on his side, breathing deeply in sleep, face soft and smooth with the merest flicker of an eyelid betraying his dreams. Rossett raised his hand to the boy’s head and almost touched it to smooth his hair, but then pulled away and continued to stare for a moment, strangely sad and not wanting to wake him. He folded the blanket they had been lying on over the boy and then stood and stretched, checking to see which parts of his body hurt the most.

  All of it seemed to ache equally.

  He crept out of the room and onto the landing, looking into a ­couple of the rooms before finding Chivers in the front bedroom, sitting in a threadbare armchair with a blanket over him, eyes closed, slack-­jawed, breathing slowly and noisily.

  Rossett crossed to the bay window, which gave a wide view of the street. He looked through the net curtains, careful not to disturb them. Outside, he could see normal life, normal ­people doing normal things.

  He envied them.

  A woman was scrubbing her step in the winter sun; another was carrying a basket of shopping, balanced awkwardly on her thigh and in the crook of her arm, the weight causing a crook in the body as she waddled home.

  “ ’Ell of a day,” Chivers said behind him, and Rossett turned from the window.

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I was. But I’ve been checking every now and then. There was a Mercedes drove down before, but I think they were just cutting through. We’re safe ’ere for now.”

  Rossett nodded and turned back to the window.

  “You got any plans?” Chivers asked from behind him.

  “I have to get the boy to safety.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  Rossett nodded, but didn’t speak.

  “ ’Ell of a responsibility, a young kid, especially a Jewish one.”

  “Yes.”

  The old man shifted in his chair and then smoothed down the old woolen blanket. Rossett turned from the window and stared at Chivers for a moment before he spoke again.

  “I got him into this. I have to get him out.”

  “ ’Is grandfather, the one he was looking for, did you . . . ?” Chivers trailed off, unsure of what to say.

  “Yes, I put him, and everyone else who lived here, on the train. He’d hidden the boy, and then sent me back here to find him and . . .”

  “And?”

  Rossett stared at Chivers, unsure if he should tell the whole story, unsure of whether the old man could be trusted with the secret of the treasure. He turned back to the window and rested his forehead against the cold glass. It felt good, and he closed his eyes a moment, then opened them again to watch some children run out of a house opposite and chase each other, darting around lampposts on and off the curb, chasing each other like leaves in the wind.

  Faint laughter floated in through the window and scratched at the silence in the room.

  “And?” Chivers tried again. “Look, chum, maybe I can ’elp you with the little fella, but you’ve got to be straight with me.”

  “Jacob had gold sovereigns with him, and . . . a diamond,” Rossett finally said and almost immediately regretted it. He felt unburdened by the truth but unnerved by Chivers’s reaction.

  “Diamond?”

  “Yes.”

  “So that’s why you’re ’elping ’im?”

  “No. I didn’t know he had it, not until I was being interrogated.” Rossett absentmindedly wiped a hand across the dried blood on his coat. “The resistance, they found it. I didn’t know he had it, I just thought he had some money to pay to someone to get him out of the country, or . . . to bribe me.”

  “Bribe you not to kill ’im?”

  “I wasn’t going to kill him.”

  “Maybe not with your own ’ands.”

  “I wouldn’t kill him, he’s a child.”

  Chivers chuckled and Rossett frowned at the old man before turning back to look at the children playing outside.

  “Do you believe that the Germans kill them?” Rossett finally spoke, still facing the window.

  “You’ve ’eard the Free BBC news, ain’t you?”

  “It’s propaganda, half of it.”

  “Even if ’arf of what they say is ’appening in Europe is, it would be bad enough. All this talk the Krauts give us about Jewish camps full of happy Jews singin’ songs and workin’ for the Reich . . . well, it’s all bollocks, ain’t it? Nobody believes it, do they? Not really.”

  Rossett turned to face Chivers.

  “Why would they kill them? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “They kill ’em, my son, because they fuckin’ hate ’em, that’s why.”

  Rossett shook his head and went back to the window.

  Chivers left him for a while with his thoughts before finally speaking again. “You can buy a lot of boat tickets with a diamond and sovereigns. Did you manage to get ’em back before we broke out?”

  Rossett shook his head.

  “Windsor, the man who interrogated me, said I knew where the others were. He said Jacob had t
old him I would be able to find them, and they wanted me to tell them where they were hidden.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  “No. I didn’t even know the boy had one, let alone where the others are or even if there are any others. I have no idea why Jacob would say that.”

  “Because my grandfather said I should tell you the secret.”

  Both men turned to the door, where Jacob stood, blanket across his shoulders, thin and pale, dark smudges under his eyes and thick black hair.

  “What secret?” Chivers asked the boy, and Jacob looked at him and then Rossett, who nodded that he should tell.

  “The secret of the treasure.”

  Chapter 40

  JACOB WAS SITTING on a wooden milking stool, back to the wall, faded wallpaper flowers surrounding him like pink fairies you couldn’t quite focus on. Rossett had found an old dining chair and he was facing Jacob while Chivers remained seated in the armchair, coughing occasionally with the wet phlegm rattle that he had brought with him from the cellar.

  “My grandfather told me that you would come back for me. He told me to stay in the fireplace until I heard you and then I was to call your name, so you could free me. But I didn’t have to call your name. You just came and got me.”

  “ ’Ow did he know you’d go back to the ’ouse?” Chivers looked at Rossett.

  “He would have known I’d have to go back to complete the inventory. Even if when he grabbed me at the train I hadn’t listened, he would have known I’d come back eventually. The old man understood how things worked; he’d been watching it happen long enough. I suppose it was a gamble of sorts, but not much of one.”

  “Whenever you came to the house, as you left he would always make me look at you.”

  Rossett vaguely recalled now the little boy on the stairs, or a face at a window as he had displaced the Jews, time after time, herding more and more of them to smaller and smaller houses. He suddenly felt embarrassed that the boy had witnessed the work he’d carried out. He looked at the floor for a moment before Jacob spoke again.

  “Grandfather said you were a good man just doing a bad job.”

  Rossett stood up from his chair and crossed back to the window. He leaned on the frame and took a deep breath.

  “I knew your grandfather when I was your age. My mother used to visit his shop. Old Man Galkoff, we used to call him, except he wasn’t that old. He used to give us sweets, the kids in the area. We all liked him.”

  “The diamonds?” Chivers said, then shrugged a “What?” when Rossett looked at him and shook his head.

  Jacob looked at Chivers, then back to Rossett, who nodded. “What about the diamonds, Jacob?”

  Jacob stood up and dropped the blanket, then took off his duffel coat and turned it inside out, holding it up in front of him. Like a conjurer the boy pulled at the lining and pinched at a seam before he loosened a thread and ripped an inch of cotton from the coat.

  He fished in the lining and pulled out a folded piece of greaseproof paper, about one inch long and three wide. He smoothed the paper carefully and then gave it to Rossett before returning to the milking stool and sitting back down, coat over his knees and blanket returned to his shoulders.

  Rossett unfolded the sheet. Inside he found a scrap of lined paper with some careful copperplate writing in black fountain pen:

  Sergeant, if it is you reading this, I trust that Jacob will be before you, awaiting your decision . . .

  Rossett looked up from the note to Jacob and felt the old man’s presence in the room with them.

  . . . I beg you to think carefully, and to take time to look at the boy before you set your mind on the path you are about to take. I know these are hard times, harder for some than others, and I know you are a man who carries a weight of what has gone before on your shoulders, much as I carry the weight of what is yet to befall me and those I hold dear. When we have spoken in the past I have seen your pain, at what you have witnessed, what you have suffered, and the suffering you inflict upon others.

  I know you are a good man, despite the evil that you do. I know you once loved, and that you lost that love. So I give you my treasure to protect, in the hope that you find your love again.

  And keep it safe.

  Jacob Galkoff

  Rossett stared at the note and then turned it over in his hands before reading it again. He looked up at Jacob, who stared back, and then back at the note once more.

  “Well?” Chivers couldn’t contain himself any longer and held out a hand to read the note.

  Rossett looked at the outstretched hand and then shook his head, before folding the note and keeping it tight in his hand.

  “There is nothing there about diamonds.”

  “Let me read it.” Chivers’s hand beckoned again, but Rossett ignored him.

  “There is nothing about diamonds,” Rossett said again.

  “What about treasure?”

  “The treasure is here, in the room with us.”

  Rossett looked at Chivers and shook his head. The old man tilted his in reply, not sure whether he believed what he was hearing.

  “Are you ’olding out on me?” Chivers finally said, the words accusing, hanging in the air like buzzards.

  “No,” Rossett replied, a cloud passing behind his eyes in such a way as to make Chivers lower his hand.

  “The boy is the treasure?” Chivers spoke softly and Rossett nodded.

  Chivers looked at Jacob and slowly leaned back in the chair; eventually, he chuckled and half coughed before smiling.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to do what I started out to do, get him to safety.”

  “But . . . but what about the diamonds?” Chivers couldn’t hide the disappointment in his voice.

  “The diamonds aren’t important, neither are the sovereigns. I wasn’t helping him to get rich.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Rossett stared at Chivers and remembered how heavy the sovereigns had felt in his pocket, and how he had felt when he’d first seen them.

  “The diamonds and the money aren’t important.”

  Chivers smirked.

  “They might not be important now, but they bleedin’ well will be when you try to get ’im out the country. Tickets don’t come free, mate.”

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “Diamonds, eh?” Chivers shook his head and then wiped his nose with the blanket, his sniffing the only sound in the room. “No wonder Sterling was so interested in you.”

  Rossett looked up, puzzled.

  “Sterling. Didn’t he interrogate you?”

  “I had someone called Windsor.”

  “That’s him, posh bloke, moans about the weather?”

  Rossett nodded.

  “He’s the head of the royalist mob in London and the south, Sir James Sterling. Works at the Foreign Office, old mate of Churchill’s.”

  “How has he kept his job?”

  “Well, turns out ’e’s also an old friend of Prime Minister Mosley. ’E walked with the Blackshirts before the war; he’s ’arf Nazi, ’arf royalist, although ’e’d never admit it. Thing about Sterling is ’e’s a survivor. There aren’t many who know about ’is double life, and if you want to stay alive you’ll keep quiet about it. When Mosley was put into power by the Krauts, first thing ’e did was get all ’is old Nazi mates gathered round ’im. Not the thugs though—­oh no, ’e got the likes of the newspaper owners, all them lords and dukes, all them ones who gave ’im money and quiet support, he got ’em all round ’im and ’e gave ’em jobs. And Sterling, he was one of ’em. Apparently they knew each other from the Great War and ’ad kept in touch.”

  “So Mosley gave Sterling a job?”

  “Nah, ’e just let ’im keep the one he ’ad. Easier that way.”

 
“How do you know this? How do you know Sterling?”

  “ ’E interrogated me, as well. Thing is, ’e doesn’t know I knew ’im before the war. When us reds and them fascists were fighting all the city, I saw ’im at the odd rally. Once he gave a speech, load of old shite about empires and working with the Germans against communism.”

  “I don’t understand how he could be a fascist and a royalist.” Rossett shook his head.

  “All them posh blokes are fascists deep down. They liked the idea of ­people like us not asking questions, and they certainly didn’t like uppity Jewish communists rocking the boat. Mosley and ’is lads appealed to ’em. ’Ad Hitler been a posh geezer who promised to bow to the old king, they would have welcomed ’im ashore at Dover. As it was, ’e ’ad ’is own king who was prepared to bow to Hitler instead. The aristocracy, or those ones who bothered to ’ang around, see a king in Buck House and one of them in Downing Street and they think all’s well with the world, ser­vice as usual.”

  Rossett shook his head at the old man’s logic, pondering that he now knew Sterling’s name and then wondering what to do with that information. Now wasn’t the time to expose Sterling. How could he prove what Chivers had said? And besides, his knowledge might one day prove to be a useful bargaining chip, assuming he lived long enough to exploit it.

  “We need to go and visit my mother,” Jacob finally said, and both Rossett and Chivers turned to look at him.

  Rossett frowned and tried to remember if he’d seen a mention of the boy’s mother on any manifests before that week. There was only one Galkoff he could remember listed, the grandfather, and there were definitely no women of an age that Jacob’s mother would have been.

  Most men and women under the age of fifty had been rounded up first, so that they could be sent for work parties on the continent. Rossett would have known if there were any other than the handful who stayed in London for reserved occupations, he was certain.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  “Willesden Cemetery,” Jacob replied.

  “Why?”

  “Because she is dead.” A child’s logic.