Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  ‘Right, Mr Goldmann, let’s move – please – and quickly.’

  He saw, could not miss, the worry lines knitted across his Bossman’s face, and also the gratitude shown him. ‘Out of the car, Mr Goldmann, and straight to the door.’

  Everything happening to him was distorted, as if mirrors were bent, throwing up images that were grotesque and malformed. Concentrate, he told himself, and cut the shit. He reached down, took his Bossman’s arm at the wrist and levered him up from the depths of the car seat. Realized the dependence, could feel it, the way the man’s fist clawed into his sleeve.

  ‘That’s it, Mr Goldmann, and let’s go.’

  The role-play consumed him, filled his thoughts. He looked round, saw that Viktor was behind the Bossman, strode for the swing doors and a man materialized. Hadn’t seen him coming. He came fast in a line, shambled and swayed. Might have been a drunk or a druggie. He was unshaven, dressed in clothes that had been slept in. A junkie’s young body but aged and haggard, his hair a dank tangle.

  Carrick dropped his shoulder, and nudged him clear of them in one brutal, sharp action. The man crumpled. Carrick glanced down and saw a grimy face that pleaded. He knew the man was harmless, that he had reacted beyond a level that was necessary. He had thrown aside a beggar or a derelict, and the door was held open for him.

  He saw hostility on the doorman’s face, and there was a jumble of words, German.

  ‘I don’t speak German,’ Carrick said, and walked towards the lift at the far side of the lobby.

  The doorman called after him, in angry English, ‘He scavenges from the kitchen, is harmless, sir. For what he is, sir, we give him some respect.’

  Carrick ignored him. He did the role-play well. He saw his Bossman and Viktor into the lift, stepped in with them and pressed the button. It was a glass-sided lift and he saw the doorman stalk away. He had known his ground or would not have spoken out so forcefully to the bodyguard of a guest, Carrick reckoned. The doorman went out now through the swing doors, on to the pavement, bent and lifted the man off the pavement, then seemed to slip something – money? – into his hand. Beside him, Viktor was impassive, but he thought Josef Goldmann’s mood had lightened, calmed by the display of force. They came to the reception floor.

  A girl behind a desk said, ‘You are very welcome, gentlemen. It is three rooms now, not two, and one is a superior suite, yes? The reservations are for two nights – it is for departure on the thirteenth of April, correct? Just your signatures, please.’

  His Bossman’s scrawl was unrecognizable. Carrick just did his initials.

  They were given key cards. Carrick led back to the lift and they went up six more floors. Along a silent corridor. He stood aside as his Bossman worked the lock and opened a door.

  Viktor said to Carrick. ‘I work out the rosters, which you will accept. Now get the bags.’

  He was dismissed, as if he was low-life.

  He went back down. Had to make peace, of a sort, with the doorman because he needed him to organize the parking of the prebooked hire car, arranged by a Berlin contact – but Carrick hadn’t been told a name – in the basement under the hotel. A good-size euro note was passed, not acknowledged as it was pocketed. The doorman, now, had that aloof look, and Carrick reckoned it was to show his contempt for the hirelings of a Russian Jew mobster who needed the swagger of protection. He took the three bags out of the boot. He didn’t know where they were moving on to – It is for departure on the thirteenth of April, correct? – whether they had enough clothes or would buy more. The man who had come to the narrowboat, who had invaded the Summer Queen, had said that the risk against him, in Berlin, increased to the level of … dead, so there are no misunderstandings. Dead. He hitched a bag on to each shoulder and picked up the third. Across the road he saw, in a doorway, the hunched shape of the derelict he had thrown on to the pavement. A stream of lorries passed on the street and in a gap between them he noted that two men still lingered on the far side.

  He took the bags through the swing doors. He thought his life depended on how well he played the role. And, here, Carrick understood nothing.

  He brought the bags to the rooms, was told what hours were his to rest, and what hours were for duty stretches.

  In his room, stretched out, he slept.

  They waited till a uniformed porter took away the hire car.

  ‘What did you think?’ Reuven Weissberg asked.

  ‘I thought it peculiar. The little boy held his father’s hand as if it were dark and he was frightened.’

  ‘And scum was pushed away.’

  ‘Harmless scum.’

  Reuven Weissberg turned away from the place where they had watched the front entrance of the hotel on the Joachimstaler, and began to walk towards the U-bahn. There was a question he did not ask Mikhail. In fact, many questions were in his mind and he asked none. Did the man, shown on the reservation as Carrick, demonstrate his qualities as a professional bodyguard when pushing scum aside? Was the man merely professional or was he also loyal? The questions floated with him as he walked. Was a bodyguard ever loyal? How far would a bodyguard risk his own skin in defence of his paymaster? Was any bodyguard to be trusted? Should Carrick, on the word of the launderer, be trusted? Had his own Mikhail earned trust? That last question, never answered, was like a stone in the shoe of Reuven Weissberg. When guarded by Mikhail he had himself been shot.

  They walked to the Uhlandstrasse station and went down the steps. He had been shot in Moscow. In the hectic days when he had battered his way into territory where other groups had believed themselves supreme, when he had snatched clients and given them new roofs, when he had recruited from State Security and Special Forces to enforce the roofs, he had made enemies of stature. In Moscow he had not used restaurants because that was where men such as himself were most vulnerable – and where he chose to attack rivals.

  He had lived with the fever of the bunker, had surrounded the villa where his grandmother cooked and cared for him with high walls, electronic alarms and guards. He did not display himself at the wheel of a high-grade Mercedes, but drove old cars that could disappear on the streets and stay unrecognized. But he had been shot on the steps of a bank after depositing money. He could count few mistakes in his life, but it had been a mistake to visit that bank on three consecutive Fridays. He had come out into the sunlight, had paused because the snow had not been cleared adequately off the steps, and looked for a sure footing. Mikhail had been behind him – not in front – and the pistol had come from a pocket. He had seen the recoil and had dived to his left. There he would have made a good secondary target had the impetus of his fall on to the icy step not caused him to slide two steps lower. The second shot had missed him. Then Mikhail had reacted.

  One shot into the chest and two into the head Mikhail had identified the getaway driver, whose panic had caused the wheels to spin, and shot him, a bullet in the head. They had fled. They had slithered away to their car. Mikhail had made it plain he thought himself a hero. He, Reuven, had congratulated him, had found the words as the pain reached beyond the numbness in his arm. They had not gone to hospital. At the villa, his grandmother had cleaned the wound, then had boiled water and used the scissors from her needlework box, tweezers and a knife to take out the debris of his coat that the bullet had forced into the cavity. She had not stitched the holes. He knew it was long ago, during times in the Forest of the Owls, that she had learned to treat wounds. He had never cried out when she had probed for debris, would not have dared to. Within the next week, six more men had died from weapons fired by Mikhail and Viktor, and a new business roof was successfully taken under his control. It had been his first step into the multi-billion-rouble death industry, and the killings made his control of an entrepreneur’s roof absolute.

  Of Mikhail, his grandmother had said to him, ‘Why was he behind you, not in front? Why did he only shoot when two shots had been fired at you? What did he risk? Trust only yourself. Never put your life into the hands of
another. Guard your own body.’

  He stood on the platform and waited for a train, Mikhail a pace behind him. He thought of the man, Carrick, whom he had seen barge aside scum, and the trust written large on the face of Josef Goldmann as he held the man’s arm.

  The train came, clattered alongside the platform.

  His grandmother had told him that survival was in his own hands, as it had been in hers, in her stories that he knew by heart.

  How much did I want to live? How often did I wish I was dead?

  Always, I wanted to live.

  In Camps 1 and 2, where the Jews were whose work made Sobibor function, there were few who did not wish to live. Only twice do I remember that a prisoner ran at the wire and started to climb, in the certain knowledge that the Ukrainians in the guard tower would shoot and kill. I learned that life is the flame of a candle. Whatever the gale of misery, we shelter it and try to protect it. Those who knew their fate, understood that they were condemned, would – not often – fight the guards as they were herded from the train. They would be shot on the platform or clubbed, then dragged down the Tube. Most of those close to death spent their last minutes in prayer.

  For us, in Camps 1 and 2, however awful the experiences, there was little thought of death as a release. Few believed liberty came with it. To survive, to wake at first light the next morning, was the goal. Some claimed it was their duty to survive in the hope they would become a witness to the atrocity of Sobibor. For most it was the simple glory of breathing that next morning, the freshness of the air, the scent of the pines, and forgetting the foulness of the smoke from the burning pits.

  There was a brothel for the Ukrainian guards outside the perimeter. The girls there, at first, were not Jews but prostitutes from Lublin. I heard it said that they were ugly, old, diseased … It was even said that a farmer from Zlobec sent his twelve-year-old daughter there for money because the Ukrainians wanted younger girls.

  There were no prostitutes from Lublin for the SS, the Germans. They used Jewesses. For a month after I had learned this I waited for it to be my turn to be taken to the Forester House, which the Germans called the Swallow’s Nest. I knew I would be taken one evening. In the days of waiting, I could have killed myself. I could have eaten glass, I could have spat in the face of an officer and been beaten to death, I could have run at the wire and been shot. Instead I waited.

  Three days before I was taken, I knew it would be soon. The Germans relied on the capos to bring Jewish girls to the SS house. The capo who supervised us in the sewing room came and stood behind me. She reached over my shoulder and held my breast. Her fingers seemed to weigh it, as if it were fruit in the Wlodawa market, and then she reached lower, poked at my stomach as if to learn whether I was slim under the loose smock I wore. I endured, after that, three days of waiting because I wanted to live.

  It was the late afternoon, a Friday. It was February. It was cold. We were in the barracks. I was on my bunk when the capo came for me. She stood in the door, pointed to me and beckoned. In the month since I had known about the Forester House, I had seen six Jewesses taken out of our camp, and only one had returned. I did not think about five, but of one. She sat, always alone, in a corner of the compound, or apart from the rest of us at a bench in the workshop, or she lay on her bunk hunched up and cried without sound. She did not talk of it.

  As she took me out into the dark and the night chill, towards the lights of the internal fence and the gate, the capo said to me, If you want to see the light of the morning, be alive. Don’t fight them but appear to enjoy it.’

  There was music in their house, from a gramophone. The capo escorted me through the gate into their compound, and in through the back entrance to their house. I heard the music, very loud, and their shouting. In the kitchen I was told to strip by the capo, then a tin bath was produced from a cupboard. I stood in it and she poured water over me from a jug. I was soaped, then dried with a towel. I was given underclothes with French labels, and I thought they had belonged to a lady who had been brought from France in the Pullman cars, who had been innocent of the purpose of Sobibor and had worn her best underwear and silk stockings for the journey to her ‘new home in the east’. The clothes would have been left in a neat little pile, then the lady would have run down the Tube, thinking of the cleansing shower ahead and the chance to dress again. I wore the brassiere, the knickers, the suspender belt and the silk stockings of the dead. My hair was smoothed, and perfume – I was disgusted by it – squirted over me. The capo took me to the door, and said, ‘Show you enjoy it and please them. Then you may live. Show you hate it, and you will die. You decide.’ She opened the door, pushed me through it, and I heard it slam behind me. A wall of noise, their music and shouting hit me, and all their eyes were on me.

  They wanted me to dance. I wasn’t a whore, I was a girl whose father repaired clocks in the town of Wlodawa. I didn’t know how to dance other than to the folk music of our people. They clapped to the beat, and I tried to dance. I’m not ashamed that I tried, because it was for survival.

  They were drunk.

  They weren’t young – not as old as my father but far older than I was.

  Perhaps I didn’t dance well enough. Perhaps it was the urge in them.

  I was pushed from behind and tripped from the side.

  I was on the carpet. The underclothes were torn off me. One made a bandanna of a silk stocking, and I recognized him as being in charge of Ukrainian guards. I was naked. But my mother and my grandmother had been naked when they had been taken down the Tube, and they had not had the chance to live. I could accept my nakedness, and their eyes on me, as the price paid.

  I bled when it started. The first grunted and pushed, swore and heaved. He had taken off none of his uniform, had only unbuttoned his trousers, and his boots forced apart my ankles. They would have seen the blood, and they cheered. Glasses were thrown into the fire, and I screamed at the pain, which excited them still more. The first hadn’t finished when he was pulled off, because others wanted to feel my blood. By the third, I moved. I did it to live. I let my hips rise when they thrust and drop when they withdrew. One was sick on me, and it was wiped away with their handkerchiefs. They all did it to me, except the senior officer. All – except SS Scharführer Helmut Schwarz, who usually commanded and supervised the men’s work parties outside the compound – penetrated me, and then they came round a second time. I was on the carpet till they staggered back from me, exhausted and limp.

  He took me upstairs. They cheered Scharführer Schwarz when he led me out through the door. He took me to his room and hung a dressing-gown over my shoulders. I understood. There was a photograph of his family beside his bed. A father in full uniform stood and his hand rested on the shoulder of a girl, his daughter, and a mother gazed proudly at her man and her growing child. He thought me like his daughter. He sat on the bed and held my hand. He was near to tears, and if I had had a knife I could have slit his throat, but then I would not have lived.

  I became his. I was the property of Scharführer Helmut Schwarz, and in his room I acted the part of his daughter and the bastard stroked me each time I was brought to him. Did not come into me, but stroked me, and I would pant and groan as if I took pleasure from him. There was danger. An SS man, Groth, fell in love with a Jewish girl, and softened in his attitude towards us – animals, a subhuman species – and when he was on leave the girl was taken down the Tube and shot. Other girls, Austrian Jewesses called Ruth and Gisela, who had been actresses in Vienna and were far more beautiful than I, were taken to the Forester House, then shot the next morning. I did not know if I would live.

  He went on leave, went back to Munich to see his wife and stroke his daughter. The women helped me. I had no protection. They put ash on my face so that I looked older. I shuffled with bent shoulders so that my bosom was hidden. New girls came, younger girls, and were taken to the Forester Hut, but I never went back. I was forgotten, and I lived.

  Never in that night when the
y struggled with each other to be the next, or came into me with violence, did I wish I was dead. I knew that only God, good fortune and I could save myself. I thought love forgotten and had learned to hate.

  ‘I don’t understand – why are we here?’

  He had been brought to the zoological garden. Luke Davies was baffled.

  He was answered, ‘That you understand better where we are and what we’re doing.’

  ‘Mr Lawson, I haven’t been in a zoo since I was a kid.’

  It was ridiculous. They had been met at the airport by the deputy station chief, Berlin. All of them had fitted snugly, or squashed, into a minibus, and the deputy station chief had driven them into the city. The vehicle had stopped in a side-street near to the old Zoo Hauptbahnhof. Lawson had climbed out, had gestured for Davies to follow him. They’d taken their bags from the tailgate and walked to the door of a small, perhaps discreet, hotel. Inside, Lawson had been greeted by an elderly porter as if a prodigal had returned. Then an old lady had come through an inner door and Lawson, with full formality, had kissed her hand. The bags were dumped and they were gone without even checking in. He had asked where the minibus was and everyone else. He had been told that Lawson never stayed at the same hotel as his team. And enigmatically, ‘They’ll take on the transport, and they’ll go to work. We’re going for a walk.’ They had been hit by a shower, and had sheltered under the arch outside the zoological garden, then Lawson – in fluent German – had bought the two tickets, an age concession on his own, and they’d gone inside.

  There was a smell about the place. Luke Davies had never been inside a gaol, but men he knew had always spoken about the distinctive stench, like a zoo. Might have been the fodder, the bedding, the stale, green-tinted water in the pools, or the creatures’ droppings. The zoo’s smell was in his nostrils, and was worse when they went inside the big cats’ house. He focused on one cage. A lioness had just been fed. A great joint of pink-fleshed bloody meat was between her huge front paws, and her eyes were malevolent as she licked the meat. He could have asked a hundred trite questions. Didn’t, held his peace – and wondered what was so important about the zoo that it took priority over checking in to the hotel … He wondered too what the team, with its disparate characters and daft identification codes, were doing.