There was a long silence and then Monty said, ‘Jesus, why the hell did you have to choose me to get involved in your bloody film? Why me?’
Abner stared at him, taken aback. ‘What’s that got to do with — ’
‘Can’t you see? I had to take you on, whether I wanted to or not, once I knew you were digging around for a film about what happened after the camps were opened. The children and the grandchildren, you said — you could have found out anything. The last thing I wanted to get involved with was that sort of film. Not that I don’t think it’ll be good. Dammit, I know it will. I’m torn in half by you, you know that? Torn in bloody half.’
And to Abner’s total astonishment, Monty began to cry, sitting there behind his vast rosewood desk and making no move to check the big oily tears that came trickling down his wattled face.
Thirty-four
He recovered after a while, and pulled a large silk square of handkerchief from his breast pocket and almost covered his face with it, like a nun’s veil, as he repaired the ravages and then emerged a little flushed and red-rimmed about the eyes, but in control of himself.
‘So, what else did you discover?’ he said huskily. ‘Let me have all of it.’
‘Oh, no,’ Abner said softly. ‘I’m sorry, Monty, but no. That’d be too easy, wouldn’t it? I want to hear from you how it is you’re involved with all this, and which of the two of them is the boy I’m looking for. Because I’m convinced one of them is.’
Monty stared at him for a long moment and then began to laugh. Not a frightened laugh, not one full of bravado, but one that was genuinely amused.
‘Oh, Jesus, Abner, that’s one hell of a jump to a conclusion, isn’t it? Why the hell should it be one of them? It might as well be me.’
Abner took a sharp little breath in through his nose, hearing the hiss of air in the sudden silence that had followed Monty’s attempt at flippancy.
‘Is it?’
‘Is — oh, be your age! Would I make a joke like that if I were? That has to be the most stupid thing I ever heard — ’
‘Why? All I know about this guy is that he’s a successful man, well thought of in his business — I was told that way back, that he’s in this business — and very well off. And now I think of it, you with your fancy offices and your Rolls-Royces and your — I guess you’ve got a fancy enough pad as well — ’
‘It’s good enough,’ Monty said, watching him beneath half lowered lids. ‘It’s good enough.’
‘So it could be you — ’ and indeed, the thoughts were skimming around in his head, rearranging themselves feverishly. He had assumed that it had to be one of the two men who had actually collected the diamonds, but did it have to be? Indeed, how could it be? Neither of them were well off or respected in the film business. Unless one of them was acting a part, which seemed unlikely, he thought; remembering how seedy and run down both of them had appeared to him. Surely, it had to be someone they worked for? Couldn’t that be why he’d first seen Heller in Monty’s office?
‘OK, so there’s a scam involving diamonds’, Monty said, ‘but where’s the evidence that makes you think there’s any connection between that and the Rats of Cracow? There isn’t an atom of proof to link anything — ’
‘Oh, yes, there is,’ Abner said very gently. ‘Oh yes, there is, Monty.’ Suddenly he was enjoying himself as the ideas and the information bits began to click into place. He’d stopped having any personal feelings at all about any of it. The springs of Postscripts that lay deep in his own childhood, in the experience of Hyman and Frieda, in the pain he had shared with Miriam, none of that meant anything now. All he was seized with was the joy of the researcher who at last has identified the significant log in the jam and is poised to release it to send the whole lot tumbling down river. He was a hunter, and the prey was there in his sights and he played, just for a moment, with life and death, delaying the exquisite second when he would fire his shot.
‘So tell me. What evidence?’ Monty said truculently. ‘Not another word do you get out of me till — ’
As suddenly as the pleasure of the hunt had hit Abner it evaporated and a sort of weariness moved into him to replace it. This was sickening. People had died horrible deaths and others had profited from their sufferings, and now all the two of them were doing was sitting here fencing with words. Sickening.
‘A contact of mine found it out. Only it was Isaac Coenen who told me,’ he said. ‘One of the people who had left diamonds with Isaac Coenen was a woman who had been one of the Cracow Rats, Libby Lippner. Isaac had shown me all the lists of names of people whose diamonds had been collected, and her name was on it. In fact, hers were the first to be collected by Heller and Garten. The very first.’ Abner managed a thin smile then. ‘Isaac told me that had made him feel good, you know? He’d been given what he thought was a genuine document that made it possible for him to give back some of the property that was eating him away with guilt. It wasn’t genuine, of course. Brazel came later with the one that was. It had been given to him by Libby Lippner. But Isaac thought it was, so he handed the stuff over to the pair of ’em. But it wasn’t enough for them. They came back after that, over and over again, looking for more diamonds, and each rime the evidence they brought to claim them was more and more flimsy. But he had to part with them — the poor bastard had to part with them — because of their threats, and now he’s dying with the shame and guilt of it all.’
‘You’re sorry for him?’ Monty said and his voice was loud now and full of scorn. ‘You’re sorry for that thief, that corpse robber? You dare to sit there and cry pity on that scum and tell me you’re thinking ill of me? Why the hell you should think you’ve got the right to — ’
He stopped suddenly and stared at Abner, and his eyes seemed to narrow as a thought hit him. ‘How do I know what you’re saying is true? This woman whose name this feller — who was it, Brazel — recognised. Who’s Brazel, for Christ’s sake? How the hell can he — ’
‘I’ve told you this before,’ Abner said. ‘He was one of the Rats himself, one of the boys who was there. He knows who the boy with the apples was. He’s been shaking him down for years. Says the man doesn’t know him by sight, hasn’t seen him since they were both kids of sixteen or so — but Brazel knows who he is now. But he won’t tell me. Not yet. I have to find out alone. And I’m beginning to think I have.’ And he stared at Monty challengingly.
Monty shook his head. ‘Not me, my friend. Not me. So, your Brazel knew the woman whose diamonds Coenen was looking after, the first ones you say that Heller and Garten collected?’
‘That’s it. I told you, her name was Lippner, Libby Lippner. She died recently. Her son is the man who lives in the Home in the Cotswolds I told you about. He’s entitled to that money, to whatever those diamonds are worth — God knows he needs it and he has a right to it — and the guy who was the boy who sold his mother and her friends for a bag of stinking apples is the one who’s got the diamonds. He’s still in the business of betrayal. Still selling people for his own profit. And I’m determined to get them from him and see that David gets them. So if it’s you, you’d better hand them over. Now. I’m not angry enough yet to do you any harm, but I could be.’
There was another silence and then Monty said heavily, ‘It makes me as sick as it does you, Abner. Believe me, it does. I’ll tell you my involvement. It’s honest enough in its own way. Listen, I need a drink. I don’t often, but right now I need a drink. You?’
Abner shook his head and watched as the fat man lifted himself heavily from his desk and went to the elaborate drinks cabinet in the corner to pour a stiff brandy for himself. He looked like a wrinkled balloon that has been left out overnight tied to the doorpost of a house where children have had a party the day before, still recognisable, but soggy, without bounce or confidence of any kind. For a moment, the sadness in him transferred itself to Abner and he felt it almost physically, and wanted to get up and put his arm around the man’s shoulders and tell him, It
’s all right, Monty, take your time. It’s all right. I know what it’s like to feel ashamed, guilty, frightened, I know.
Monty came back and sat down and drank slowly, in steady sips, not looking at Abner, and then began without preamble.
‘She died in ’eighty-four, my wife. A good enough girl in her time, a good girl. A real Golders Green sort of girl she was, never thought of anything but the clothes on her back and the covers on the furniture, know what I mean? Well, maybe not. You don’t live here, after all. But she was. A good girl, a bit greedy, but good. She’d had it hard. Her parents were refugees, got out of Germany just in time, when she was twelve. Lost everything, or so she was told. They were a secretive lot, her family — Solly had been a furrier — my father-in-law ala va shalom — but here in England no one wanted to know. He never got a decent job. Spent all his life here moaning and complaining. When I married Jessie — a boy I was, only twenty, such a boy — he told me one day there’d be a nudden for me, a dowry, you know? As soon as he could get his hands on it. But me, I never minded. He had a stroke not long after we got married in ’forty-five and then he died. His wife, Rivka, she died a little after — never got over him — and then my Jessie died in ’eighty-four. And going through her stuff after, I found this piece of paper and I couldn’t believe it. Her father had kept it in his socks drawer, or something — must have done. I don’t know how else Jessie got hold of it except after he died and she cleared out their flat. She was only a girl herself at the time — what would she know? Anyway, she had this piece of paper I’d never seen, and I looked at it and I thought, I must find out. So I asked Heller to help me. I’ve known him for years, a schlapper he is, no more. I wrote letters to Amsterdam and got nowhere, so I had to have a gofer, because me, I didn’t want to — well, I just couldn’t go. Don’t ask why, I couldn’t.’
There was another silence and then he burst out, ‘Shit, I couldn’t! Couldn’t face a man and ask outright for the stuff listed on that paper. I was entitled — Jessie left me everything the way her parents had left her everything — but I felt sick and bad about it. I wanted it but I couldn’t go and ask myself, so I sent Heller. Promised him a lot if he went, and that I’d find him and kill him if he cheated me. Anyway, I knew he wouldn’t. He’s a real nebbish that one, a gofer is all. He can run errands but he’s got no nous to do anything for himself. He’s trustworthy because he’s too scared and silly to be anything else. So he goes and gets me the stuff and there I am with stones worth — well, I don’t know what now.’
He got to his feet again and looked at Abner and then across the room and then with an almost imperceptible shrug, as if to indicate how little it mattered, went across to the other side with a lumbering walk and pulled on the picture of the singer Rousseau that simpered from its gilded frame. Abner turned in his chair and watched and saw the safe that was behind it, and with a sudden awareness of what it meant twisted back. He didn’t want to see him work the combination, would never want to know how to have access to the thing. Not that he was a potential thief, but he somehow felt safer if he didn’t watch.
Monty came back and put a package on the table beside him. ‘Have a look,’ he said. ‘You’ll see your friend Coenen lied to you. Or he chose to have forgotten what really happened. He gave these to Heller for me five years ago. I was the first one to send him there. So look!’
Abner stared at the package and then, as Monty said again, impatient now, ‘So look!’, he reached out unwillingly to pick it up and unwrapped the brown paper. It covered an old tobacco tin and after a moment he opened it and inside there was cotton, which he pulled aside, still unwillingly, and there they were — half a dozen dull pebbles the size of hazel nuts. He gazed at them and Monty said, ‘Uncut, they are. I took ’em to Hatton Garden, had a word with a friend there. He offered me a hundred and twenty thousand pounds for them. As a gamble. Said if I sent them for cutting myself and they turned out to be first quality stones then I might expect more. If not, a lot less. But he’d gamble if I wanted to sell to him.’
‘You didn’t do either,’ Abner said and closed the tin. ‘They’re still here.’
‘I didn’t do either,’ Monty repeated and took the tin and wrapped it and locked it away again, as Abner sat and stared down at his hands. ‘I couldn’t do it. You understand me? I couldn’t do it. It would have been like — ’ He came and sat down behind his desk again. ‘It would have been like making a table to eat from out of Solly and Rivka’s bones. If the old fool had told me before, or told Jessie, what the paper was — but then he was a secretive old sod. If I’d known when Jessie was alive I could have gone and fetched them with an easy conscience, could have sold ’em, bought for my Jessie all she ever wanted — ’ Again his eyes glinted. ‘Not that anyone could do that. Wanting was what my Jessie did better than anything. She died too young, rest her sweet soul. But now she’s dead I can’t use them. They’ve been there ever since, those stones. Five years, almost, now.’
There was another silence and then Abner stirred in his chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at length. ‘It wasn’t till I started to talk to you here that I thought just possibly, it could be you. The mirror and all. But now — I’m sorry.’
Monty said nothing, lifting one hand in a sort of benediction and they both sat and thought their own thoughts. Until Abner sighed softly and said, ‘But that wasn’t the end of it, was it? For Heller, I mean.’
Monty’s face seemed to settle into heavier lines. ‘No.’ Now he allowed himself the luxury of anger. ‘That stinking little bastard can’t keep his tongue between his teeth. He was paid enough to do that errand. The whole thing cost me money, a lot of money, seeing I never sold the stones. But can he keep quiet? Not him. Goes shooting his mouth off to Garten, and the next thing I know is they’re back here, the pair of ’em, asking me who else I know who might have money in Amsterdam. They’ve got the whole list — all the names the man Coenen had in his notebooks. The old fool had let Heller look as much as he liked; so, using more sense than I ever thought the little toerag to have, he copied the lot. They wanted to go after all the names they could. “Bounty hunting”, they called it. They kept coming to me, over and over. I know so many people, you see. But I told ’em I wanted no part of it — it made me sick. These things belonged to people who’d been gassed, tortured, how could they do it? Unless they were going to get the money out to give to Jewish charities maybe — but those two? They’d give to charity the way a drowning man hands over his lifebelt.’
‘You let them get away with it?’ Abner said. ‘It didn’t occur to you to tell other people — the police, perhaps? What they were doing had to be illegal, surely?’
‘What’s illegal? You think I didn’t think of that? Nothing was illegal. They’d got information about property held by someone else. They’re looking for the owners so they can claim for them and get a commission, maybe. They’ve got this idea there’ll be children, grandchildren who don’t know their lost relations had property they could claim. That’s not illegal.’
Again a silence, and then Monty said painfully, ‘I could have made a big song and dance, of course. Told the world what they were doing, especially when I knew they were forging papers, making up the names of the people they said were children of the owners and then holding on to the goods. That was illegal. But they had me over a barrel, Or rather, he did.’
‘He did?’
Monty looked at him and then his eyes slid away. ‘There aren’t just those two in it. I told you, Heller’s nothing more than a gofer. A guy who can do what he’s told but never thinks for himself. Except that one time, the first time he went to Coenen. Don’t you think I feel bad about it? Where did he get the idea from but me? It’s hell to live with. But he couldn’t do more than that, he has to have other people to help him — ’
‘Garten,’ Abner said and shivered slightly, remembering the unpleasantness of the man Garten in his seedy club with his cheap red wine. ‘Hasn’t he the ability to run a scam like this?’
‘Maybe. But I don’t know — there’s more to it than you think. It’s not just in Amsterdam it’s happening.’
‘“Not just” — how do you mean?’
‘Oh, it’s all over the place. Jews stashed away goods and cash in so many places. Some got out and managed to get their possessions after the war. Lots didn’t. In ’eighty-five or so, the money that was in banks had to be lost — after forty years it seems the banks no longer have to hand it over. It becomes theirs.’
‘You’re kidding!’ Abner said. ‘That can’t be legal!’
‘It seems so. Anyway, I’ve found out — God, but I found out! — it’s been going on for years. You’d think by now they’d scraped the pot clean, but they haven’t. Someone found a warehouse in Paris in ’eighty-six full of the most marvellous gear — Lalique glass and Gaillard ceramics and Grasset silverware that had been put away by one big French family. All of them died in the camps, and no one knew what was there till the land was sold, and the place opened up. As I understand it, they sent the money to Israel. Or some of it. There’s more around no one ever hears of. Lots of it. And people have been scouring around to get their hands on it for a long time. Six million Jews died, Abner. Not all of them were poor people, believe me. The Germans took a lot of what they owned, but enough got hidden to make searching for it worth while. And they’ve been searching.’
‘Heller and Garten — ’
‘And others. It’s a — how shall I put it? It’s been well orchestrated. Run by a clever man.’
‘The boy with the apples.’
‘If you say so. I don’t know. It seems possible.’
‘It has to be. He’s the only one who could have known that Libby Lippner had property tucked away like that. Once Brazel found out from her about it he went to try to get it for her, but it had already gone, hadn’t it? Someone had forged a document to get his hands on it, using Heller as his tool. He had to be someone who knew that she had it. Who else but the boy who’d been in the group? They must have talked about what they had, what they’d done — maybe he’d been promised payment for his efforts after the war from what she’d got put away in Amsterdam?’
Postscripts Page 37
