Displaced

by Barbara Nadel

  Mumtaz looked at the battered little photo. A dark woman, probably in her thirties, unsmiling, her hair falling like a black lace curtain over her shoulders, held a laughing baby girl with white curls. The child was beautiful.

  Lee picked it up. ‘I’d like to take this if I may.’

  ‘Oh no, I never let it out of my sight!’

  Suddenly he looked like an old man, fearful and vulnerable.

  ‘I need to make copies,’ Lee said. ‘You can have it straight back.’

  ‘Oh, copies, yes. Why didn’t I think of that?’

  And yet he still looked scared.

  ‘I was in the police and I know there are ways pictures of kids can be aged to see what that person might look like now,’ Lee said. ‘I’ll also need recent photos of your mum and dad.’

  ‘I can do that, yes,’ he said. And then he shook his head. ‘What an impossible task I’ve set you.’

  ‘And I’d like to speak to your dad’s old mate,’ Lee continued. ‘People sometimes know things they’re not even aware of. And if he liked your dad, I’m sure he’ll want to help.’

  Irving Levy just said, ‘Maybe.’

  They didn’t speak to anyone except to each other and then only in whispers. Occasionally one or other of them would yell out if part of a rig was about to crush someone. John didn’t understand why they were even with the fair. He understood they’d been with Lesters since dinosaurs roamed the earth, but why they had remained was a mystery.

  He looked at the old fossils as he drove the truck off the site and onto the road. Apparently, donkey’s years ago they’d performed in a freak show as Siamese twins. People still called them ‘Ping’ and ‘Pong’, although which was which was anyone’s guess. Both of them wore black kimono-style dressing gowns and neither of them was ever seen without full ‘Chinese’ make-up. One of the blokes on the candyfloss had told him that they actually came from Newcastle. But who knew?

  John Shaw had worked for the fair for the past five years. An electrician by trade, he was also part of the set-up team, positioning and testing the rides before they opened to the public. At nearly thirty, John knew he should have some sort of direction or ambition, but being on the fair was a laugh. He didn’t have to worry about accommodation and there were plenty of excited girl punters gagging for a bit of wild fairground boy action wherever they performed. He’d heard that takings were down so far this year, but he didn’t let that bother him. If Lesters packed up he’d find another fair to go and work in, or a theme park. They made loads of dosh.

  In reality, driving old Ping and Pong from site to site wasn’t really too much bother. They didn’t exactly distract him from the road. But they did creep him out, especially when they took their hands out of the sleeves of their kimonos and revealed those bloody awful fingernails of theirs.

  Mandy hadn’t bought the lime green miniskirt from Barking Market. Instead, she wore the usual tent dress and sensible shoes. Also, as usual, she spilt half her dinner down her front. But then it had been a particularly sloppy tagine. Tasty but sloppy.

  As soon as they’d finished their meal, Lee had taken her into the shed out the back of the restaurant, which acted as a ‘shisha’ pipe lounge. When they walked in, they were greeted by a fug of sweet apple-scented tobacco being exhaled by a small group of middle-eastern looking men. Pushing the shisha pipe to one side, Lee lit a fag and they both sat down on cushions that were really uncomfortably too near the ground for Mandy.

  Once he’d settled himself, Lee said, ‘So what do you reckon?’

  Mandy shrugged. ‘You can access the British Newspaper Archive online. An event like a child’s disappearance won’t be difficult to find.’

  ‘Yeah, and thank you for that,’ Lee said. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘Yes, but you knew about that, anyway, didn’t you?’ Mandy said. ‘What you really want is for me to spend every waking hour trying to dig up some old hacks who worked on the Recorder in the sixties.’

  Lee said nothing. He’d started out asking Mandy about archive newspapers and then moved on to tap her about people who’d worked on the paper in the past. He could, of course, get names himself from the archive, but he knew that Mandy’s dad had also worked on the Ilford Recorder and his tenure had begun in the late fifties. He also knew that, when he died, Mandy had taken all of his records, which she now kept in her small flat.

  ‘Dad’s been dead four years and he was one of the last to go, I think,’ Mandy said. ‘And anyway, why do you think I’ve got time to go through Dad’s old contact book looking up blokes who are probably demented?’

  ‘Because it’s a good story?’ Lee said.

  ‘Oh, it will be if you find the woman,’ Mandy said. ‘But what if you don’t?’

  Lee shrugged. Failure was more possible than success in this case. Not that he’d thought about any sort of contingency. Eventually he said, ‘Free tagines for six months?’

  Mandy looked away.

  He’d already bunged his ex-police artist/computer geek contact a grand of Irving’s money to ‘age’ Miriam Levy’s baby photograph. He didn’t want to take the piss, but then he said, ‘Alright, Mand, tagines for six months and a contribution to the charity of your choice.’

  She turned her eyes on his and Lee felt a shiver run down his spine. She looked soft, but Mandy was as hard as nails.

  ‘And if that turns out to be your rent, that’s fine with me,’ he said.

  FOUR

  He remembered everything. It was a curse. Sometimes he felt as if his head was a rubbish bin to which the dustmen never came. He wished they would. The Garden had been a different place when he was young and he’d preferred it. Back before the war there’d been no goyim, except for the few Italians that remained at the Clerkenwell end. But nobody minded them. They made suits and religious statues and he could even remember the last of the Italian barrel organ men. Their food, though not kosher, had been strange and delicious and, for yiddisher kids like Jackie Berman, always a guilty treat.

  Since the war so much had changed and not just because of the bombing. New faces had appeared in the Garden, people from all over the country and beyond. Even shops, God help us, had opened where the public could go and buy a ring off the peg. Indians and Pakistanis many of them, buying jewellery fashioned to their tastes by other Indians and Pakistanis.

  That, however, was only the Garden that the punters saw. Those in the ‘trade’ were open to the ‘other’ world, the subterranean labyrinths and jewel houses in the sky that were recorded in minute detail in Jackie Berman’s never to be emptied head. There were rooms within tunnels within basements under the streets of Hatton Garden. Dead rivers and wells once used by alchemists, makers of guns and which had quenched the thirsts of resurrection men running for their lives from the peelers, their dead plunder slung over their shoulders.

  There were places where nothing really went away. He’d heard people say things he could understand about manors like Spitalfields, Stepney and Limehouse. As in Hatton Garden, these were places where history lay thick and where those who knew where to look, like Jackie, could see things that passed others by.

  Where dead men walked in daylight, where men with the faces of Old Testament patriarchs turned pebbles into gems, anything was possible. Jackie pushed himself further into the battered doorway behind him and watched as Irving Levy walked towards him with some tall goy in tow.

  They wanted something.

  The name Austerlitz had originated in Moravia. As far as Mumtaz could tell it was a name used only by Jews including, to her surprise, the father of the dancer Fred Astaire. But so far she hadn’t been able to track down any Berliner chemist shop owners.

  Irving Levy’s mother, Rachel, had been the only member of her immediate family to survive the Holocaust. But there had to have been an extended Austerlitz family, if not in Berlin then somewhere else in Germany. Irving had concentrated on the family of his grandmother, Miriam Austerlitz, née Suskind, who was apparently related to a Muni
ch family called Reichman. Through the Reichmans, although Irving didn’t know exactly how, Miriam had a Gentile relative called Augustin Maria Baum.

  Mumtaz sat back in her chair and put her pen to her lips. Irving Levy had by his own admission ‘run out of steam’ with his genealogical researches. He’d contacted the Wiesenthal Institute in Los Angeles, who had provided him with the Suskind/Reichman/Baum connection, but with no accompanying explanation. She could chase that up but, more significantly, she’d also discovered, via the Internet, that something called the Simon Wiesenthal Archive existed in Vienna. It was this, now less famous organisation, that kept the most extensive records of families affected by the Holocaust as well as those Nazis who had attempted to destroy them.

  Mr Levy was keen for Lee or Mumtaz or both to go to Berlin to identify the Austerlitz family home in Niederschönhausen, if it still existed, and as he’d put it ‘speak to people’. But who? Sick and possibly dying, Irving Levy hadn’t thought about what he wanted to happen. Mumtaz sympathised. She rarely thought things through in her personal life. Had she done so she would never have slept with Lee Arnold. Not that she regretted what had happened that night. It had been the first time she’d ever felt pleasure in sex. And he’d told her he’d loved her. Poor Lee. After that she hadn’t known what to do and she felt that, tough old soldier that he was, she had, if not broken, bruised his heart.

  She should never, never, never, never have taken him to her bed.

  She looked back at her computer screen and typed in ‘Niederschönhausen’ and ‘synagogues’. The Austerlitz family had probably been members of one of the local synagogues. The search came up with two and they were probably the biggest, most well-known synagogues in Germany.

  Eva opened the caravan door and went inside. The old man sat in his bed, watching trash TV and eating caramels. The smell of him, though not strong, turned Eva’s stomach. Piss and dust.

  She stood at the bottom of the bed, blocking his view of the TV and said, ‘I’m going.’

  He said nothing, although he did register some irritation at not being able to see his programme.

  Eva had expected no more. She shrugged and began to leave. Just as she got to the front door she heard him say, ‘Send Gala, in case I need something.’

  She took great delight in replying, ‘Gala’s busy. And, before you say it yourself, so’s your precious Amber.’

  He frowned and Eva turned away. He had a glare like a gorgon.

  ‘Then you come back quick and don’t you go nowhere!’ he said.

  The desperation in his voice made her shudder.

  Lee narrowed his eyes. It made his vision less distinct, almost smoky, which is what it would have been back in the nineteenth century. What remained of Hatton Garden’s ancient rooftops had a random, flung-together feel to them. As if bricks, tiles and chimney pots had just been thrown together with no regard for symmetry or logic. It was also, Lee felt, a place that was out of time. His head began to swim.

  ‘Vertigo can be a problem,’ Irving Levy said as he put a mug of tea in one of Lee’s hands. ‘But rather that than being trapped in a basement.’

  Lee, who was still getting his breath back from the long climb up four steep staircases said, ‘Certainly gives you a workout.’

  ‘Nearly kills him,’ the old man who’d let them into the building said.

  Irving Levy shook his head. ‘Just come in, Jackie,’ he said. ‘And get Mr Arnold a stool, for God’s sake.’

  Jackie Berman went back out onto the landing while Lee looked around. Getting three of them in what wasn’t much more than a cupboard was going to be a squeeze. And it was a cupboard that was full of stuff. Most of it lay on a bench underneath an arched Georgian window. A conglomeration of tools was how it was probably best described. But Lee recognised none of them apart from the six sets of old-fashioned balance scales, of decreasing size, that sat at the far end of the bench. Everything else had to be what Levy used to cut and polish diamonds as well as instruments through which to magnify stones and their facets. Bits of cloth and newspaper were attached to most of these articles. Levy sat down on the one high stool in front of the bench while the old man, when he returned, plonked down a pair of what looked like kids’ stools on the remarkably clean floor. As Lee lowered himself down onto his stool, he noticed that the calendar on the wall dated from 2010. The old man kicked the door closed.

  ‘This is where I work,’ Levy said. ‘Years ago I worked here alongside my father and he worked here with his father before that.’

  ‘I done the sweeps,’ the old man said. ‘A big job when you’ve got two men cutting.’

  ‘The sweeps?’

  ‘When we cut diamonds there’s residue or dust,’ Levy said. ‘This is valuable and so we collect it to sell on to manufacturers of grinding and sawing tools. Mixed with liquid it makes a keen cutting surface rock hard. Nothing is wasted.’

  ‘Except your life,’ the old man said.

  Levy shook his head. ‘You have to forgive Jackie,’ he said. ‘Seventy years in the Garden which he loved, but won’t say he loved …’

  ‘I never graduated from sweeping!’

  ‘You never wanted to!’

  The old man waved a hand. ‘Ach! And now me eyes have gone I’m useless. Rub it in!’

  ‘Useless is relative, Jackie,’ Levy said. ‘Why do you think I’ve brought Mr Arnold here to speak to you if I think you’re so bloody useless?’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Yes, him,’ Levy said. ‘Mr Arnold is a private detective; he’s going to try and find Miriam for me.’

  ‘Your sister? She’s dead.’

  ‘She’s missing, Jackie. No one knows whether she’s alive or dead. But through Mr Arnold here, I’m having a go at finding out.’

  The old man crossed his arms. ‘Fool’s errand,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  Lee looked up at Levy. Had he told the old man, who clearly had been some sort of employee at one time?

  ‘Because I want to know!’ Lee interpreted this as he hadn’t. ‘She was my sister. Later this year I’m going to be sixty-one …’

  ‘Last you saw of Miriam, you was seven,’ Jackie said. ‘If she is alive, where’s she been all this time? Who’s she been with? What’s she been doing? Fifty-five years and not a word from you about your sister and now this? She’s dead. Give it up! You’ll drive yourself round the bend.’

  ‘That’s my choice.’

  The old man shrugged his shoulders.

  The Neue Synagogue was actually part of a cultural and educational complex known as the Centrum Judaicum. It contained archives relating to Berlin’s Jewish community and at least one very enthusiastic archivist. According to Frau Metzler, the Austerlitz family had worshipped at the Neue Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse. Close to their alleged home in Niederschönhausen, it had been a centre for the Liberal Judaism that had appealed to the pre-war Jewish elite. Mumtaz, on the phone from the more prosaic surroundings of Green Street, was fascinated.

  She’d been completely upfront with Frau Metzler.

  ‘So this is your client’s mother’s family,’ she’d said when Mumtaz told her Irving Levy’s story. ‘He thinks.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not a name I must say that I know,’ Frau Metzler said. ‘Austerlitz. But then if they all died …’

  ‘Dieter Austerlitz, my client’s grandfather, ran a pharmacy, although I’m not sure where.’

  Not for the first time, the fact that Irving knew so little about his mother’s family hit her. In spite of the trauma of Partition, she knew a lot about her mother’s family. Significantly, she knew they had fled from their home in India to what was then East Pakistan. Even now older members of her amma’s family mourned the loss of their home city of Faizabad. In India, so her mother had always said, her family had money. Whether that was just wishful thinking, Mumtaz didn’t know. But at least she knew something.

  ‘I will see what I can find out about the family Austerlitz,’ Frau Metzler sai
d. ‘If you have any other names that might help, that could be useful.’

  ‘They had family in Munich.’

  ‘Put it all in an e-mail and I will get back to you as soon as I am able. I will need a little time.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  When she finished the call, Mumtaz sat back in her chair and looked up at the office ceiling. It needed a good swipe with a cobweb brush.

  Then she thought how ridiculous even noticing something so trivial was. She really needed something else in her life besides her family and her work. Something, or someone, just for her.

  Irenka Horvathy.

  Eva touched the name, now fading as lichen ate into the gravestone, but not with affection. She’d died when Eva was seven and, apart from the manner of her death, all she could remember about her mother was the screaming.

  Her father sometimes nagged her about not speaking Hungarian unless she had to, but she always told him the same thing, ‘It reminds me of that old witch, Irenka.’ Then he shut up.

  And what a witch she’d been! Handy with her fists, spiteful, she’d made Eva’s young life a nightmare. Teasing her dead straight hair into limp, lifeless curls with red-hot tongs, laid for minutes on end in the fire. One time she caught Eva’s hair on fire, which had then prompted another fight between Irenka and Bela. That time he broke her nose. Worse had been to come, which was why she was here.

  Rippleside Cemetery in Barking was one of the least restful places in which to spend eternity or even half an hour. Wedged between the A13 and one of the biggest council estates in the country it was always being vandalised. Last time Eva had visited she’d had to scrub a spray-painted swastika off Irenka’s grave. If only they’d known her. She’d have loved that.