Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  On the train home, returning in ignominy to the West Midlands, he had dropped his head on to his arms and wept, such was the humiliation he felt.

  The anger had been born.

  A man came to the Portakabin where the Crow worked. The door was rapped. He opened it. A package was given him. He closed the door. He had not seen the courier’s face, and was confident that once the man had left the site, under the huge crane, the entry pass given to him would be destroyed.

  Inside the package he found airline tickets, a passport issued by a Canadian agency and a map of the rendezvous point where he would meet a brother and the criminals. There was a contact address for the hawaldar in the German city of Hamburg. He would provide the funds to be paid to the criminals. He had no love of such people, but times were hard and survival ever harder.

  Too many were now arrested, were in the gaols of the Americans. Too many networks had been broken into, too many plans, near to execution, had been disrupted. But this would be a great strike, the greatest, and the Crow’s part in it – though small – was of prime importance. He must work and deal with criminals, pay them for what they delivered in American dollars supplied by the hawaldar, though they were kaffirs. It was necessary to buy from whoever could supply, even from unbelievers.

  The hate in his heart was undiminished by the years that had gone by, was fresh and keen. He locked the package and its contents in his floor safe. To work with unbelievers – to achieve a great strike – was justified, as it was to buy from criminals.

  He returned to his work and quantified how many tons of cement mix were needed for the coming week, but he would not be in Dubai to oversee its delivery. He would be with mafiya men whom he despised.

  Reuven sat quietly in the shadows. This part of the warehouse was Mikhail’s territory.

  Back in Perm, in the early days, he and Mikhail had owned expensive pedigree dogs, two Rottweilers and a German Shepherd. They were vicious beasts and controlled only by Mikhail and him, but gentle with his grandmother. She could handle them and they slobbered at her whisper, all of them, but the dogs created terror. Reuven thought Mikhail more violent and more sadistically cruel than the dogs at their worst. When they had left Perm, moved to Moscow, he had asked his grandmother what should be done with the dogs, to whom they might be given. She had said, ‘Shoot them. You want a dog, put a collar on Mikhail.’ She had walked away and the dogs were not spoken of again, but she had stroked their heads, had bent her small head low so that they could lick her face, and she had condemned them.

  Two weeks before, the chair had been taken by a Bulgarian who had tried to muscle into the Kurfürstendamm trade in girls. The stains were still on the concrete floor, with the dirt that had been thrown over the wet blood. Those who already ran strings of girls on the Kurfürstendamm paid for the protection of their businesses, and two weeks before, the competition had been removed. They would have thought their investment in a roof was money well spent, and they would have seen the reports in the Morgenpost newspaper and on television after the Bulgarian’s body was discovered on the banks of the Tegeler See. Reuven had been away, reconnoitring the Bug river, but he had seen what Mikhail had done, and what his clients would have read and watched, and knew they would be satisfied.

  In the chair now was an Albanian.

  The Albanian, an immigrant from the Kosovo city of Priština, had tried to sell passports. Not good passports, inadequately forged ones, but they competed with those sold to non-European Union men who had come across frontiers to Germany and needed legitimacy, and who would pay ten thousand dollars for a passport, however poor. But Reuven Weissberg provided the roofs for a Russian and a Romanian who sold better passports. The day before he went to Poland he had visited the Albanian and had spoken calmly of the need for this man to transfer his business to Dresden, Rostock or Leipzig, anywhere other than Berlin, but the man had spat in his face.

  That evening the Albanian was brought – having been lifted off the street when walking his daughter, the child abandoned to find her own way home – to the old warehouse in the Kreuzberg district between the canal and the Spree. Tied down in the chair, where the Bulgarian had been, the Albanian had again spat defiance, but then had seen what was his fate.

  A cable brought the power from the wall. Among the multiple plugs at its end was the lead for a power drill. On a table beside the drill was a small chain-saw, a welding burner, lit, and a loaded pistol. A message was about to be sent to the two traders in passports who would read the Morgenpost and see the city news on television.

  The chair was screwed down to the floor. The Albanian was tied fast to it. His shirt was pulled back and the marks of the flame disfigured his body. He was not gagged and not blindfolded. He could see what would be used on him next, and could scream, but no one came to that warehouse. It was as it had been in Perm, to enforce the roofs, and in Moscow … This, of course, was only minor business in the empire of Reuven Weissberg. He had links in Sicily and Milan; he could arrange protection for any American business looking to exploit the new wealth of Russia; he could transfer cash sums, suitcases and boxes of it, to London where it was handled by Josef Goldmann. But the small detail of insignificant contracts – the protection of men running girls or selling passports – excited him.

  The screams expired in the dark steel joists high above the Albanian. The purr of the drill was drowned by them. The needlepoint went for the kneecaps. He watched.

  He had survived beatings as a conscript in the army, and a killing attempt when shot in the arm in Moscow. He knew pain, but not fear. In two years in the army, stationed at the Kaliningrad base, he had been thrashed by NCOs and officers for selling off military equipment pilfered from stores, and for organizing the shipment of Afghan heroin out through the docks, but he had never cried out. After the fourth beating he had cut his infantry colonel into a share of his profits, then been left free to trade. His ability to endure what was handed out to him, with boots and clubs, by the NCOs and officers had made Reuven Weissberg, the Jew, a hero among the conscripts. He had never howled for the pain to be stopped. Had he done so, he would have disgraced his grandmother.

  It was enough. The Albanian was burned, his knees were pierced and he had fainted with the pain.

  Mikhail shot him. Stood behind the chair, held the pistol and fired one bullet. He thought he heard the cry of geese. If the Albanian had not fainted, Mikhail might have started up the chain-saw. The geese squawked and the shot seemed a faint retort. Blood spattered the concrete floor and the plastic hooded cloak that Mikhail wore.

  Then the silence came, and the geese did not call. Weissberg sat for a moment, then glanced at his wristwatch. He told Mikhail they must hurry or be late. A body was to be moved, taken to open ground by the Teltow canal, and the plastic clothing disposed of, the chain-saw, the drill and the welding burner put away in the concealed safe. The warehouse was returned to the pigeons that nested on its roof beams. He and Mikhail worked fast, then dragged the body away, leaving a thin smear of blood across the concrete.

  I learned it, every detail. I could have walked each step of it. I knew how long it took from beginning to end.

  The women on the bunks at either side of me, level with me, in the barracks said I had no right to ignorance. I think they were jealous that it had protected me and not them. I was told what happened.

  They came by train. If they were Polish Jews or Jews from the east, they expected to be murdered so they were controlled with extreme violence. They were so terrorized that they had no idea of how to resist, and they were exhausted from their journey. From the Germans, there was no pretence of a new life awaiting those Jews. It was different for those who came from the west, from Holland or France.

  The western Jews, and there might be a thousand in the train transport, were greeted with deceit. Often they came in the best carriages with upholstered seats, had brought luggage with them and wore their best clothes. They came to this small station in the centre of a forest
and had no idea where they were, or what awaited them. Their carriages were detached from the engine, then shunted to the siding. From the windows they saw flowers in pots, an orchestra played, and young Jews, who were dressed in railway uniforms, waited on the platform. They were helped down from the train and their heavy bags lifted for them.

  They were escorted first to a building where they were asked – it is correct, asked – to leave their luggage, and ladies’ bags. Then they went through the gate into Camp 2. When that gate closed behind them, they were dead, but they did not yet know it. They were separated, man from woman, but the children stayed with the women. And they were moved on to a covered but open area. Already the bags were being searched for valuables and money by the Pakettentragers, Jewish men who could do this work and live a week or a month longer. The Jews from the train were now addressed by SS Scharführer Hermann Michel: not an old man, a little more than thirty, with a smooth face, a baby’s. From a low balcony, he would say that he was sorry about the hardship of the journey from Holland or France, that he welcomed them, that because of extraordinary sanitary conditions at this transit camp – their home only for a short while before they moved to settlements in the east – everyone must be washed and disinfected. Then he would tell them in glowing words of the life that awaited them after they rejoined their men or women. He spoke so sympathetically, was so pleasant, that often at the end he was applauded.

  An officer in a white jacket, appearing to be a doctor, then led these west European Jews into the yard and requested they undress. There were Ukrainian guards with guns, and the Germans with whips, but still the deception succeeded and the Jews retained their innocence. They undressed. It might be snowing or raining, or the sun shining, they might be young or old, with perfect bodies or ugly ones, but they had to undress to complete nakedness. They were led into the Tube.

  The Germans called it the Himmelfahrtstrasse, that is the Road to Heaven, the Heavenly Way. It was about a hundred and fifty metres to the far gate, and the surface of the track was sand, and wide enough for three to walk abreast, and they could not see what was beyond the Tube because of the pine branches placed in the wire. Guards were behind them to hurry them, and ‘the doctor’ led at a brisk pace. Before they reached the end they came to the Barbers’ House. Here, the hair of the women was cut short – but the men were led straight past it. A few more yards and there was one more gate.

  The officer, the ‘doctor’, worked now with great skill. He would make jokes, and talk, and then, abruptly, this gate was opened, and beyond it were the doors of the chambers that awaited them, and the sign above them was ‘Bathhouse’. They were pressed in, forced close. The chambers were four metres long and four metres wide, and they put many more than a hundred people in each. Six chambers could contain a thousand souls. Then the doors were shut.

  Now, they did not have to be Polish, Ukrainian or Belarussian Jews to know the deception: the French and Dutch Jews, too, understood … By now the next train transport would have arrived at the station platform, the orchestra would be playing, the jewellery and money was gone from the bags, and the clothes moved to sorting sheds – it was a production line.

  Many would sing in the last moment before the engine was switched on. Schma Israel! Adonai Elohaynu! Adonai Ehad. The voices would rise. ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord is good! The Lord is One.’ The engine killed the noise.

  A German, Erich Bauer, was responsible for the good functioning of the engine, which had been stripped from a heavy Russian lorry. He was the Gasmeister, and his assistant was a Ukrainian, Emil Kostenko. Only once did I hear that the engine failed and the Jews were in the chambers for four hours before it was repaired. Then they were gassed with the carbon monoxide that was piped from the engine’s exhaust into the six chambers. There would be great screaming, but the engine and the walls made it seem like the rumble of artillery guns, and a Jew was always in place to chase after the geese and make them squawk. They sang, in the last moments of their lives, ‘God, my God, why have You forsaken me?’

  The engine of the Gasmeister and his assistant could kill a thousand men and women and children in twenty minutes.

  When the engine was switched off, the geese were left to run free and there was silence in the chambers, the far-end doors were opened and a Jewish Kommando started work to clear out the bodies and make the chambers available for the next transport – perhaps already listening to sweet words of reassurance or stripping naked or walking along the Tube. Most of the bodies still stood because there was not room for them to fall when they died.

  Twenty minutes, crushed in the chambers, to die. Two hours from the shunting of a train to the opening of wide doors and the escape of the poison.

  Once, naked women fought the Germans and Ukrainians in the Tube and were machine-gunned. Those who lived were driven at bayonet point into the chambers.

  Once, an old Jew threw sand from the Tube into the face of a German and told him that his Reich would vanish as dust and smoke. He was shot dead.

  Most went to their deaths in ignorance or terror. Few had the opportunity or the strength of will to fight … We did. We who lived and serviced the camp and knew its purpose, and knew our own fate when our usefulness was exhausted, demanded to live – and did not know how to achieve it. If we had not wanted to survive, clung to life, worked in the camp, Sobibor could not have existed. We, the living, enabled it to function.

  I knew. I had lost the protection of innocence and ignorance. I wanted to live.

  The darkness was over the forest. Tadeuz Komiski sat by a grave. The place where he had dug it, beside which trees, the distance from his home, was his secret.

  The summer of 2004, four years ago, had been spoken of on the radio as the worst in a half-century. Torrential rain had caused the Bug to break its banks, fields to flood, tracks to be blocked and the roots of trees to be washed away. A grave had been opened and a skeleton exposed. The layers of needles, composted leaves and shallow sand had shifted under the incessant rain.

  He remembered the young man and the woman. The bones still wore the uniform of the camp. He had moved the remains. The uniform had disintegrated and the bones had come apart, but he had tried to do it with dignity. He had dug a new grave, deeper than she could have, with his long-handled spade. His life was cursed by this man, but he had buried him again and had mumbled a prayer before filling in the earth.

  If it had not been for his fear of watchers in the forest, as there had been the day before, he would have put posies of wild flowers on this spot. He could not. They would be seen. A crime would be uncovered.

  He knew of no one else who lived under such a curse, with such guilt.

  Alone, Tadeuz Komiski watched the grave.

  He picked blackberries. Little Jonathan. Ignored by his grandparents and left to roam while his mother was at work in the food factory. Below him, in mid-stream and on a spur of submerged rocks, an angler wielded a great salmon rod and cast a many-coloured fly, with big hackles, towards the top of a wide pool. He picked the fruit and dropped the berries into a plastic bowl.

  He was not asleep, but dozed. Sometimes he was the child who heard the thin cry of the osprey over the Spey near its mouth. Sometimes he was the man and there was the clatter of ducks on the river outside the narrowboat’s hull. He was too tired to sleep.

  Only in a few early autumns had there been enough sunshine to bring on the blackberries in the last days before term started. He might have been eight or nine, but he remembered everything of that afternoon, and he had searched the banks for the bramble clumps among the gorse on the banks.

  The narrowboat was the Summer Queen and she was moored at another bank, of another river, was held by two ropes and two iron pins hammered into the grass. He had been there three hours, and Katie had been waiting for him. She had cooked for him but he had only toyed with the food and he knew she had expected to get into bed with him, but he had pleaded exhaustion so she’d left him. Still dressed, his shoes kicked off,
he had stretched out on the bed. In his mind was his weakness that evening. He had left the house, had walked away down the street with the family’s bouquet in his arms, had turned the corner – only reached it by extreme willpower – and had known he was out of their sight, and had damn near collapsed against an iron railing. He had realized how weakened he was. He had leaned on the railings and shivered.

  The child, Jonathan, picked and filled the bowl. The little cry of excitement from the river, an arching rod, then the silver flash in the water as the fish was brought to the net. He had seen that, and its clean execution with a hammer blow to the head. A tear had welled at the killing of the fish but he had wiped it away. The fish’s death was not important. It was not why he recalled that afternoon above the Spey.

  If he had not recaptured a moment of his youth, Carrick would have been overwhelmed by the suddenness of the gunfire in the street and by the long stress of living the lie. He would have seen again the family’s gratitude, the perfect brilliance of the flowers given him. It had taken a toll of him, he recognized. By now he should have written up the Book: it was obligatory for an undercover level one to take the first secure opportunity to write up the Book in which all matters of potential evidence and interest were listed. The Book was too sensitive an item for him to keep. Katie had brought it. He should have written up the events of the last several days – the routine, the confusion over the arrest of Simon Rawlings and his own promotion on the household’s ladder, the chaos of gunfire in a City street, major material, and the promise of Josef Goldmann that Johnny would, in future, be at his side. It should all have been in the Book, but it was not.