Timebomb : A Thriller (9781468300093)

by Seymour, Gerald

  He had carried it into the kitchen and put it on the draining-board. Carrick would have expected some brief expression of thanks – obvious, whatever the language used – and then for Mikhail to go back to the meeting. He did not. Carrick watched him. Mikhail rinsed the coffee dregs from the mugs and sluiced the pot, then took a cloth and dried them, did it with care, and placed the mugs on a shelf in a cupboard. Carrick saw this as a slight but unmistakable sign of servitude.

  What thoughts were in his mind revolved on the racing, spinning tip of the drill. Carrick could not have said how close he had been to confession – shouting, screaming, anything to get the hand holding the drill to move back and away from his kneecap. If he had made that confession he would have gained himself a minute, a few minutes, a half-hour, of life, but by now he would be dead. Too right. Dumped. A ditch, a shallow grave. So, the closeness of it had numbed him, left him quiet.

  They taught in SCD10 that an undercover, when pressured by suspicion, should not try to twist his way out but should turn and confront. ‘Change the direction,’ one instructor had preached, ‘throw it bloody back at them, deflect their attack, make them answer some bloody questions.’

  ‘Be outraged at the very thought of their accusation being true,’ another instructor had said.

  Everyone worth listening to on the courses reckoned that an undercover, working with level-three criminality, would find his legend threatened and must hit back.

  His kneecap would have been pierced, no doubt about it. Adrenaline had exploded in his mouth – the pure instinct of survival, not planned but made on the hoof – and then the soft response, in words he hadn’t understood, of Reuven Weissberg.

  He could still feel the grip of Reuven Weissberg’s fist on his coat, and had known that he would have stumbled, might have fallen, crossing the wasteground from the warehouse to the car. Mikhail stood in front of him, and seemed to eye Carrick.

  Carrick stared back. If the grandmother had not been there, Carrick reckoned Mikhail might have spat in his face. Wouldn’t have dared to, not in her presence. On-the-hoof decisions were accepted by a cover officer and a control in SCD10. There was acceptance that no damn manual could legislate for the unexpected crisis, and a crisis was having a cordless drill with a hand on the trigger, the tip spinning a few inches from a kneecap. If he hadn’t seen the puckered wound of a bullet’s entry, when Reuven Weissberg had discarded his coat, if … But he had. The accusation had not been thought through, and it had saved him. Now, the adrenaline was long drained out, and the numbness had taken hold.

  Carrick could recall the words, the sounds, that he had not understood, Enough and Free him, and he had seen Mikhail’s eyes in that dance of disbelief, had heard Josef Goldmann’s weeping, but it was Reuven Weissberg who had stood, come to the chair and waved Mikhail back. Then Viktor had loosed the straps and lifted him from it.

  He thought Reuven Weissberg had saved him from the pain of the drill and then had saved his life. He sat in the chair at the table and gazed down at the dregs in the bottom of the mug. He would not have survived but for the intervention of Reuven Weissberg. He had felt the strength of the man through the leather jacket’s sleeve, had seen the strength of the eyes, had heard the soft command of the voice – and owed his life to that man.

  Mikhail said, ‘I am to tell you that we move on in the evening.’

  Carrick shrugged, acknowledged, but did not speak. Did not press for explanation – where, when, why? He thought Mikhail believed nothing of his denial, and that an enemy had been made. Carrick presumed that the outside of the block was watched. They had found him in the night, which meant that a surveillance team was in place, and he presumed, also, that they had been outside the warehouse. They had not intervened. He had been a second, two seconds, from having a drill pierce his kneecap. But for the quiet words spoken by Reuven Weissberg, he was meat, beaten and bloodless.

  Carrick had lost count of how many times he had studied the last undissolved grains of coffee in the mug. He lifted his eyes and found the picture. He searched among the depths and darkness of the trees but could not find no meaning there. The only meaning he knew was that Reuven Weissberg, not those who had sent him, was his protector.

  She packed his bag, always did. ‘Do you want him as a trifle, a bauble, because he belongs to someone else?’

  He stood beside the bed. She folded two shirts, underclothes, a pair of jeans, and already in his bag were the heavy socks he would wear with boots. Reuven said, ‘When did I ever want anything as a toy?’

  ‘Because he belongs to Josef Goldmann. Do you want him for that reason?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s not of your blood or your faith.’

  ‘Blood isn’t important to me and I have no faith.’

  She sighed, long and slowly. ‘You’re ignorant of him.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough of him to know him.’

  ‘You don’t need him. You have Mikhail.’

  Reuven said, ‘I have Mikhail, who didn’t protect me. Josef has Viktor and Grigori and they didn’t protect him.’

  ‘Is protection so necessary now that you wish to bring a stranger to stand alongside you?’

  ‘Because of where we go, what we buy and to whom we sell, I need a good man in front of me, behind me and alongside me. A good man …’

  ‘A stranger.’

  ‘A proven man.’

  She zipped the bag shut. It was old, battered, scraped and scuffed. He thought of the bags he had seen, from across the street, carried by the porter into the hotel when Josef Goldmann had arrived. Three of them, and they had shone with quality. His own bag had come from the market in Perm, from the stall of the man who had been his first customer, who had bought the first roof that Reuven had sold there. Two rivals had been bludgeoned for trying to take back the customer’s trade and impose their own roofs. The zip worked, the hand straps were still secure, it did not have breaks in it from which the contents could fall, and he had no need for a newer, more expensive bag. She washed his clothes by hand, and ironed them. No maid was allowed into the apartment. No luxury was permitted.

  She asked, ‘Are you wise, Reuven, to trust?’

  ‘I can’t watch my sides and back.’

  ‘You have Mikhail.’

  The bitterness was a quiet rasp in his voice. ‘And he did not watch my front.’

  ‘How long will you want him for, the stranger?’

  He softened. He took her old fingers in his, ‘You trusted, once.’

  She would never weep. Since those days as a child, when his father was dead in the corrective labour colony from pleurisy, his mother was going to the East, as far as it was possible to go, to look for work as a bar singer, and he had been dumped with a plastic bag of clothing in the home of his grandmother, he had not seen her cry. He could see the eyes but not beyond their glaze … One thought was perpetually shut from his mind. What would he do when she died? His grandmother, Anna, was now in her eighty-fifth year. She was so frail … He wouldn’t think of it.

  He knew the story, every word.

  It was 27 September. Autumn was coming quickly to the forest outside the fence, and there was a heavy damp in the air because the summer of 1943 had been poor. On that date a train came from the Minsk ghetto, and it transported more than one thousand seven hundred Jews to our camp. A few were POWs of the Red Army.

  As the Russian prisoner soldiers were marched into our compound, we could see them from the barracks hut where we worked. Immediately it could be recognized that one man among them was different. He was tall, had cropped hair under his military cap, was sallow-skinned, and wore the uniform of a Soviet officer. They arrived early in the morning, and at the midday break we came out of the places where we worked and met them as they stood around, trying to focus on where they were now held. I think there were ten of them, chosen for their stature and because they were still capable of work. They stank of the cattle trucks in which they had spent four days and nights without food, w
ater or a latrine.

  That late September was a time of particular crisis for those of us who clung to life in the camp, a time when despair edged closer. Rumour ran rife. Before the transport from Minsk arrived, no trains had come to the forest sidings for three weeks. Rumour said that the camp was to close. Then we would not survive. We lived because the camp lived. If the camp died, we died. All of us who had clung to life would be put to death when the camp had no purpose. Rumour said it was ‘soon’ that the camp would close.

  It achieved little, but at the camp – among the workers servicing it – there was an escape committee. A few of the men who went into the forest for woodcutting, in the last months, had broken away and run into the trees. They had been advised by the committee on where to hide the first night, where they might find partisans and where they should avoid the murderous Polish farmers and foresters; each time there was an escape attempt the rest of the work party were shot. The head of the committee was Leon Feldhendler, who was from Lublin.

  I did not hear it, but others did, and each word of the first conversation between the Russian officer and Feldhendler careered as free charging whispers among the prisoners. The name of the Russian Jew, the sole officer among them, was Sasha Pechersky, a lieutenant. Pechersky was a fighting soldier, not a cook or a lorry driver. Each exchange between him and Leon Feldhendler came to us by relay of mouths … It was a day of fine rain and the cloudbanks were low over the fences and the trees, but there was darkness that day over all of the camp except on the north side where the glow of fire turned the cloud orange. The darkness was from smoke. He asked, Pechersky, what was burning, but Feldhendler told him not to ask. He asked again, in innocence, and demanded an answer. Feldhendler told him, ‘It is the burning of the bodies of those who came on the train with you.’ And, Feldhendler told Sasha Pechersky of the Road to Heaven, the sealed chambers, the engine of Gasmeister Bauer, the work parties who took the bodies from the chambers to the dug pits and the others who burned them. He explained why there was dark smoke against the cloud and the firelight. It was said by those who were closest that there were tears in Pechersky’s eyes.

  A young soldier was standing a step behind the Russian officer. I thought he was my age. A smooth face, no beard or moustache, and downy hair on his cheeks. Our eyes met. Pechersky had just been told why there was smoke and fire. The young soldier looked at me and I at him … He was beautiful. Quite slight, with fine, gentle hands, a clean white skull where his hair had been shaved, but he stood tall and not like a prisoner, as tall as Pechersky. He smiled at me. In all the months I had been at the camp, no man had smiled at me. He called his name to me – Samuel. I blushed and called my name back. I couldn’t say why I let him have my name. In the compound of Camp 1, I had survived by trusting no one, man or woman, but I did it … Then guards came and an SS officer, and they were led away to start work.

  The next day rumours spread of Pechersky.

  The SS officer, Frenzel, took the work party into the forest to cut timber. When he brought them back to the camp, Frenzel demanded they sing, and said they could sing in Russian. Did they sing an anthem? A love song? A lament? Pechersky, the leader, told his men to sing ‘If War Comes Tomorrow’, a partisans’ song. They marched back to the camp, and Frenzel did not understand, but the Ukrainians did and didn’t tell him.

  If war comes tomorrow

  Tomorrow we march.

  If evil forces strike,

  United as one,

  All the Russian people

  For their free native land will arise …

  It was defiance, and word spread.

  On his third day there were more rumours of Pechersky. He had been set a challenge by Frenzel to hack apart a tree stump within five minutes. He would have been whipped had he failed, but he had achieved it with half a minute to spare. He had refused Frenzel’s offer of cigarettes as reward, and refused half of a fresh-baked roll from a Ukrainian’s lunch, saying that the rations at the camp were adequate. I tell you, with honesty, there was no defiance at the camp until that man came. To refuse cigarettes and fresh bread was defiance on a scale not seen before. Everyone, by the evening, knew of it.

  Each time I saw Pechersky, I saw Samuel. He walked a step behind Pechersky, always close to him. He looked for me and I looked for him. I had been long enough in the camp to have had burned from my soul any trace of emotion. I have to say it – each time I saw Samuel I felt as if sunshine fell on me. It was as if, for the first time, I nurtured a trifling hope for the future. I hardly dared to think of such a distant goal, but it had captured me.

  A new rumour, like an infecting virus, ran in the camp on the fourth day after Pechersky’s arrival. It was said that on 15 October the Germans would have completed their work at the camp. We would not survive that. Before, the rumours had been vague as to the timing. Now a date was talked of. Two moods gripped us. Pechersky had created a changed atmosphere, almost one of resistance. And there was despair with the talk that we would all be forced at bayonet point down the Himmelstrasse, thrown naked into the chambers and be there, body against body, when Gasmeister Bauer started the engine.

  The capos were quiet that night. They patrolled with their whips but did not use them, and did not shout.

  It was the night, also, that Pechersky came to the women’s barracks and met Feldhendler. I did not, of course, know it then but it was in our barracks hut, used for better security, that Feldhendler offered Pechersky total authority over any escape attempt he might consider. They were at the far end of our hut, huddled together, and spoke softly so they could not be overheard. Samuel had come with Pechersky, and we talked a little at the window. He held my hand – he had fingers as thin as those of a musician – and he told me he came from the city of Perm and had been captured when on a reconnaissance patrol west of the Moscow suburbs. I told him I was from Wlodawa, that my father had repaired clocks and wristwatches, and that all of my family were dead.

  I asked him, ‘Is it possible to hope?’

  He answered, ‘You have to believe in Sasha Pechersky. If anything is possible it will be because of Sasha Pechersky. It is what he carries on his shoulders, the hopes of us all.’

  ‘What can he do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Hope has a small, frail flame. To make it burn, I gave it trust. I offered trust to the young man who held my hand beside the window. Then I felt weaker and cursed myself. We looked out of the window at the tops of the trees nearest to the wire. They seemed beyond reach, and between them and us there were fences and guard towers, water-filled ditches and a minefield. I remember I heard the owls call from the forest.

  He edged closer to them. Tadeuz Komiski had long had the skill, practised over many years, of moving silently among the trees.

  They planted pine trees.

  His feet, in old boots, stepped on the mat of decayed leaves and fallen needles that had dropped from the canopy. The light was failing, the rain pattered around him, but he did not put his weight on any dead branches.

  They brought pine trees that were already a metre high on three wheelbarrows. Some dug the holes, some lifted the pines and placed them with their rooting compost in the holes. Some stamped down the compost around the slender trunks and others watered the base of the trees with a rubber pipe that led to an oil drum. Some hoed the ground where the next holes would be dug. They were, Tadeuz Komiski thought, like a labour detail, but they had no guards and there were no guns, no whips … He could remember when there had been guards, SS Germans and the Ukrainians – not well but with a halting clarity, but then he had been a child.

  Men and women were planting the trees and clearing the path, some his age but most were younger. They worked hard with enthusiasm, which was different from when there had been a labour detail in the forest. They had strong, cheerful voices, but there was no laughter. He went closer. They stopped, broke off from the work. Komiski, behind a tree, saw flasks opened – they ignored the rain falling on them – and sandw
iches taken out of plastic boxes.

  He had not eaten properly for three days at least. The scent of their food and their coffee wafted to him, and his feet moved silently forward but there were always tree trunks between him and them.

  A voice hit him from behind.

  ‘Hello, friend. Don’t watch us eat – we’ll share with you.’

  He understood German, enough of it. He recoiled, felt trapped. He was between the big group and one man, and froze, but he yearned for food. He turned. The man was young, clean-shaven, and his features blazed warmth. He was zipping up his flies and then he fastened his belt. He held toilet paper and a short-handled spade was propped against his leg.

  Komiski could not speak.

  ‘Did I frighten you? I apologize sincerely. Come, join us – I’m Gustav.’

  His arm was taken. They had taught him German at school but it was a full sixty-five years since he had heard it spoken in the forest. He was led to the group. The young man, Gustav, spoke fast to his colleagues, and a sandwich was offered him with a plastic beaker of coffee. Tadeuz Komiski wolfed it and gulped the coffee, spilling some from the side of his mouth. He thought the members of the group too polite to laugh at him, and bent to pick up a crust he had dropped. Another sandwich was given him.

  He was told, ‘We’re from Kassel. We’re an anti-fascist group. Only two of us are of Jewish origin, but ethnicity isn’t important to us. We’re making a memorial of the Road to Heaven. Those of us who are Jewish had relatives who died in the camp, but the rest of us are here because this is decent work. The Road to Heaven was the path used by the SS to drive victims of the extermination programme from the rail platform to the chambers where they were asphyxiated. We’re lining the route with good pine trees we bought from the forestry authority. We won’t finish this year, probably next.’