Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  If Carrick had hoped that by walking through a strange city he might again recognize himself, he had failed.

  He was sodden, cold, confused.

  The sign on the corner of the block above him said he had come on to Fuggerstrasse. So damn tired … Another clock chimed, and he did not look down at his wristwatch to see how much of a four-hour window remained open. There was a doorway with a high step, and a door of heavy wood that was closed – probably chained, bolted and barred against the pariahs of the night. There was a polished brass plate beside the bell button, but he didn’t bother to read who worked, at what, in the building.

  Carrick slumped down. Wet came off the mat and soaked the seat of his trousers. He wedged himself into the corner and had one shoulder against the wall below the bell and the bright plate, the other against the door. He drew up his knees so that they were against his chest, wrapped his arms round his upper shins and rocked. He couldn’t have made himself smaller or more insignificant, and his mind had clouded. He was beyond, now, any evaluation of the consequences of not being in a hotel room when a small alarm bleeped on a bedside table. Nobody cared. Not fucking Katie, not fucking George, who had cut him adrift and handed him over, not the fucking man who called himself Golf. What did they know of goddam Viktor, goddam Mikhail, goddam Weissberg, and the goddam old woman who was a grandmother? And what did they know of being alone? Not a living soul cared. He had no responsibility for missing the call of the clock beside the bed. A man passed, was across the street, walking briskly under an umbrella, but the rain must have blown into his face because he, too, had a drip on his nose. No, he didn’t recognize himself.

  Johnny Carrick was huddled in the doorway, his head on the arms that were round his legs, and his resolve leached away.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Dennis said.

  ‘Can’t argue with that.’

  ‘Ready to chuck in the towel, because he’s – like I said – gone.’

  They were at the far end of Fuggerstrasse, where it joined Motzstrasse. Dennis had led down the street and identified the doorway in which their man, November, was sitting. They were contrasting personalities, with dissimilar hobbies when not working as increments for VBX, but in matters of their trade they shared skills. Dennis claimed peripheral vision of 140 degrees, and Adrian rated his at up to 160 degrees. When they were not being used as increments, they lectured on the National Surveillance Course for recruits and there they taught the necessity of ‘third-party awareness’, which meant scanning from the corners of their eyes without shifting their heads – peripheral vision. Neither had had to twist his head to see November in the doorway.

  ‘You happy that he hasn’t a tail?’

  ‘Would have showed if he had, but it hasn’t.’

  ‘Well, seeing the state of him, we’ll have to call the gaffer.’

  ‘If he’s a goner, the whole thing’s down the tube.’

  By touch, Dennis activated his mobile, which was bulky in his anorak pocket because of its built-in encryption devices, tapped the keys, waited for his call to be answered. He was in his fifty-third year, married but without children, and found relaxation in an apron in front of his cooking range where he did serious French cuisine. He would have described his colleague – standing with him on the junction of Fuggerstrasse and Motzstrasse in the damn rain – as the best partner it was possible to acquire, but he did not take their professionalism to social levels and had never cooked for Adrian. What was common with them was a mastery of surveillance, being seen without being noticed.

  ‘That you, Mr Lawson? … Right, sorry and all that. Bit of a problem with your November. We were kipping in the wheels by the hotel when he came out. I was doing watch, woke Adrian. He was just shambling about, walking but going nowhere. The rain’s been pissing down on him but he has no coat. He’s drenched. Right now, he’s in a doorway … Hold on.’

  Adrian tugged Dennis’s sleeve, said softly, ‘Lay it on a bit thicker, give it some juice. He’s about to cop out.’

  ‘You should get here, Mr Lawson, and quick. From the body language of him, we’re about to lose him … Right, right. It’s the junction of Fugger and Motz … Mr Lawson, don’t hang about.’ Dennis dropped his wrist from his mouth, and his hand in his pocket closed the call. ‘How was that?’

  ‘Had to be said – wasn’t the time for mucking about.’

  If they had been thrown together on a train or in a bar, and they had not been linked by their skills in surveillance, they would have had little in common. Their creed was to pose the question: ‘Can I be remembered, recognized or described?’ Dennis did not think so. Neither did Adrian. But, his opinion, the anticipated hard stretch was still ahead of them if the agent – November – put his act together and insinuated further into a conspiracy … got his act together and quick. Many times before Dennis had trailed in the wake of undercovers, had watched them from a remote distance, been unseen and unheard; had seen the stress on them, like they smelled of it, and had thanked his good God it wasn’t asked of him.

  ‘Did the gaffer say how long?’

  ‘Did not.’

  ‘Bringing the whole gang?’

  Dennis grimaced. ‘Wouldn’t you, if it’s all going down the bloody drain? Without his access, we’re dead in the water.’

  ‘We trusted nobody,’ she had said, in her thin, whistling voice, as if she blew through a reed when she spoke. ‘To seek trust is to look for comfort where there is none.’

  He lay on a Spartan, institutional, steel-framed bed. Under Reuven Weissberg the old mattress had lumps and did not protect him from the sharpness of the coiled metal springs. He had slept in that bed, on that mattress, since he was a child. It had been given him on the first night he had spent in his grandmother’s care. He had been four years old and his feet had barely reached halfway down the bed. Now his bare toes stretched beyond its end. He knew it was her belief that the bed would harden him.

  She had gazed down at him as she said it, and had put on the wood slats of the chair beside the bed the chipped china mug of warm milk. The same mug had been brought him every night that he had slept under the same roof as her, and every night he would wait for the quiet to fall on her room and listen for the faint rhythm of her snoring. Then he would go to the lavatory, tip the warm milk into the bowl and flush it away. He hated its taste, and would not have dared tell her. She had voiced her doubts on the wisdom of trust, and her eyes – as they always did on this matter – had screwed and blinked as if the word was an obscenity.

  ‘If you trust, you make yourself weak,’ she had said.

  He had spoken of Goldmann’s trust in the young soldier.

  ‘When you trust, you depend on another. You should trust only yourself, as we did.’

  He had spoken of Goldmann’s trust in the young soldier who had saved his employer’s life without thought of himself.

  ‘Trust is softness, tenderness and pity. They did not exist where I was, except with the dead.’

  He had spoken of Mikhail, who had been late on a reaction. His fingers had massaged the gouge in his upper arm where a bullet had hit. He had spoken of the young man he believed worthy of trust.

  ‘Believed? Only believed? Do nothing until you have tested him with extreme rigour. Test him to the point of breaking him. I will not have him back in my home until you have. I will not see him again.’

  She had gone. He smelled the milk in the mug on the chair beside his head. The bed hurt his back and hip but he would never complain of it to her. It would have been a similar bed on which his father, Jakob, had eked out the last days and nights of his life – hacking and coughing, a victim of pleurisy – in the criminal camp north of Perm; dead and gone when his son was four. It was on similar beds that he had slept during his conscription service. Others alongside had wept, but he had not … or from the beatings of the NCOs.

  He had not heard her return, but the door opened. She looked down at him. ‘Y
ou have not, Reuven, drunk your milk.’

  ‘I’m waiting for it to cool. I will, of course, as I always do.’

  She wore a thin dark wrap and it was tight round her tiny body. She was at the end of the bed, by the iron rail. ‘Do you remember my story of trust?’

  ‘Every word.’

  He listened, as he had so many times, and saw the trees of the Forest of the Owls and the concrete supports of the central watchtower, and the path that was the Himmelstrasse of sixty-five years before – the Road to Heaven. He saw it today and saw it then, and heard her voice.

  Three hundred Jewish girls – that was the figure we heard from the rumour – were brought from Wlodawa many months after I had come to the camp. It was February 1943, and I was surprised, when I heard of their arrival, that there were still Jews left in the town. They must have been among the last.

  I did not see them. Had I, then there would have been girls I knew, those I had been to school with and more who had come with their fathers to my father’s shop. They came in a larger transport – I do not know it for certain but the rumour said they arrived by train and were then separated. Old men and young, older women, who were mothers and grandmothers, and all the children were sent ahead of them into the Tube, or the Himmelstrasse as it was called. Three hundred Jewish girls were kept back.

  It was said that they were put into storage, as meat would be put into a refrigerator. After the rest of the transport, their relations and friends, had gone down the Tube, the band had played, the fraudster in the white coat had led, the Ukrainian bastards had driven them on, the doors had closed and the engine had started … they were put aside.

  We did not know then why three hundred young Jewesses remained in the Tube. We were not fools. If a man or woman lives as close to death as we did, then the sense that interprets events will rear. We did not know, but we had opinion. All the talk that evening in our barracks hut, among those who had only the intention to live another week or another month, was of the Jewish girls who were in the Tube, in the area that had been cleared of the suitcases and travel bags that were normally left there. I believe those girls would have trusted, thought there was truth in what they were told because the kitchens in our section were ordered to produce bread and soup for them. It was the first time that food had been taken to those who had entered the Road to Heaven. They would have slept with the comfort of trust.

  The following day – it was 11 February: I cannot say how we registered the date of each day of the week, each month of the year – although we did not know, the opinions grew, flourished and fattened. We were taken off our usual work. The sorting of jewellery and money and clothing was stopped. The tailors and bootmakers were taken from their benches. The laundry was given more people to help and the best uniform of each German was brought for pressing and starching, their boots for polishing. I was among those women who were escorted to the SS quarters, the Swallow’s Nest, and others went to Commandant Reichleitner’s office, which they called the Merry Flea, and we had to clean and scrub the floors until they shone. The capos would not say what was expected but, of course, we realized a visitor of the highest importance was expected. The men used pine branches to brush the sand of the compound where the snow had been cleared. I remember that it was bright, sunny, and there had been a heavy frost, but we had not had snow for more than ten days. There was bitter cold, and ice hung from our huts, but in the Swallow’s Nest a fire burned, so it was good to work there. I do not believe that any of us – I did not – considered the cold in the shed where the three hundred Jewish girls were kept.

  And another night passed. We shivered in our bunks, we held each other for warmth, and another dawn came.

  It was 12 February. I was with those who were taken again to the Swallow’s Nest to do more cleaning, which was ridiculous because the rooms could not have been cleaner. I saw, through a window on the first floor high enough to have a view over the fence with the pine branches, that policemen on horses rode round the edge of the camp. All the Germans were excited, and nervous, and they shouted at us, and the capos hit us if we looked up from cleaning the floorboards.

  We were being led back to our compound when the train came. The outer gate was open. It was possible to see through it, when he got out of the carriage. Then we were in our compound, and it was impossible to see more. The image of him was frozen in my mind. He wore a long open leather coat, spectacles without rims, and he was saluted with a forest of raised arms. An older woman knew, Miriam Bloch. She had survived because she was the finest seamstress in the camp. She had seen him. Miriam Bloch said he was Heinrich Himmler.

  Because Miriam Bloch had identified him – Heinrich Himmler – we now knew why three hundred Jewish girls from Wlodawa had been kept back from the transport. They had been in the baggage shed for two days and nights. Did they still trust in the lies they had been told? Were they still calm? We were now at our normal duties, but we listened. That day I worked in the section that sorted clothing. There had been a Dutch transport a week before, and the clothes worn by Dutch Jews were superior in quality to those of Polish, Ukrainian and Belarussian Jews. The clothing of the Dutch would be shipped to Germany for issue to those who had lost their possessions in the bombing. The capos were fierce and had whips that day; we were told we might be inspected and might not, but if we were visited by Heinrich Himmler we should not look up, should not speak, should carry on with our work.

  He did not come to us.

  We listened.

  There would have been time for coffee to be served to Himmler and his party in the Swallow’s Nest, and time for him to walk along the path cleared of snow to reach the Himmelstrasse, and time for the procedure to be explained to him by the commandant. More time while the liar in his white coat gave his speech on the need for delousing Jews, then began to lead them – the three hundred Jewesses – down the Road to Heaven. Perhaps, even then, most believed him and trusted his words. More time while Heinrich Himmler watched as their hair was cut, as the three hundred Jewish girls stripped naked, as they shivered in the cold, then began to run after the trotting white coat, with the guns of the Ukrainians behind them, inside the narrow width of the Tube towards the doors of the chambers. I think they would have used three, and I think Heinrich Himmler would have strode forward quickly after them so that he saw the doors opened and the girls forced in, the doors slammed shut and the bolts pushed home.

  We listened. Some, afterwards, said they had heard the singing of the girls, the prayer of despair. I did not. I was collecting silk blouses when I heard the engine of Gasmeister Bauer switched on, and I had started to cut off the labels from Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Eindhoven when the geese began to squawk, and then there was quiet.

  Before leaving on his train, Heinrich Himmler stayed to dinner in the Swallow’s Nest. We heard later that he had offered his congratulations to the officers, and that he had promoted Commandant Reichleitner to the rank of Hauptsturmführer and Deputy Commandant Niemann to Untersturmführer. And he left us. We lay on our bunks in the barracks and heard the train pull away. Had he smiled when he first saw the Jewish girls?

  I did not cry myself to sleep that night, 12 February, in the knowledge that – for a demonstration of the efficiency of the process – three hundred Jewish girls from my own town, Wlodawa, many of whom I would have known, had been put to death with fumes from Gasmeister Bauer’s engine. I was alive. I would face another day. I could hate and loathe. I survived, and they did not, to see the light of dawn seep into our barracks’ windows. And that day there came a new rumour. It said that the Germans had suffered a defeat in battle against the Russians, at the city of Stalingrad, and that they were in retreat … But I had no trust and did not believe that another would save me – only myself. I was, as we all were, alone.

  ‘Where is he?’

  Adrian pointed down the length of the shadowed street.

  Dennis said, ‘Third doorway from the far end, this side.’

  ‘I’ll do
this on my own.’ Lawson left them and strode off down the pavement. He heard steps behind him – Davies and little Charlie, the cuckoo girl. He went fast and fancied they hurried to keep up. Once he flicked his fingers, irritably, behind his back as a gesture that he didn’t want them close, but they ignored him and kept coming. He had been fast asleep, dreamless as usual, when the call had come, and he had pulled on clothes over his pyjamas.

  He remembered Clipper Reade’s story. Clipper had had a good story for a similar situation … Dennis had said: From the body language of him, we’re about to lose him. It was the same as Clipper had faced on the bench in the park below the old fortress at Gdansk. He’d listened well to the big American’s story, told over two pots of Earl Grey, some thirty years before.

  He came to him.

  He looked down into the dark of the doorway. The man was curled up, foetal, his shoulders seemed to shake, his hands were clasped tight below his knees but still trembled, and his head was sunk. Well, small mercies, while half recovering from the confusion of that damn call coming in he had made one correct and important decision: to keep bloody Shrinks out of it.

  He turned. Caught Davies and the cuckoo girl in his glance. ‘You stay back. On no account do you interfere. You are not a part of this.’

  He crouched. With a short jabbing movement, he slapped November’s cheeks, right and left, little stinging blows – and the eyes in front of him opened wide.