by John R Burns
As he finally got into bed the worry was about his son’s reaction to Brucker if they managed to meet him. Leon accepted what Rachel had said so often, that their son was ravaged with an anger that he could not control. They had seen it on the rugby field. At university David had regularly got into fights. His game was always likely to explode into violence. That was why they only went to watch him on rare occasions. Both he and Rachel had dreaded seeing another of his outbursts when it would take several of his own team to pull him away from fighting.
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As planned the next morning David went to hire a car leaving their Rover with its English number plate in the hotel car park. Both were in winter overcoats as they set off across the city. More snow had been forecast on the local TV station. Both of them had spent a night in overheated rooms that still had not been fixed.
‘Whatever happened to so called German efficiency?’ was David’s sarcastic comment that he finally made to one of the receptionists who was now beginning to think he was just out to make trouble.
In less than half an hour they were parked up in the tree lined avenue with its expensive houses walled or fenced off from the road. There were a few other cars parked in the street. Mothers were taking their children to school as the sky darkened. Old leaves were frozen onto the pavements. Here the sounds of the rest of the city seemed at such a distance that they were just a fain drone in the background.
Leon watched as David walked off down the street towards the smart apartment block to check on Brucker’s flat number.
‘We don’t want to be too obvious,’ he had said to him before he got out of the car, ‘The quicker we do this part the better.’
‘Won’t be a minute and that’s all we’ll do this morning. We can come back later. We have to find out first if he’s here and then what his routine is if he has one.’
‘Don’t worry about that. Brucker will have one,’ Leon said with confidence, ‘I’ve been thinking about him long enough to know that much.’
‘But you can’t be sure,’ David had argued.
‘Of course not, it’s a guess, an estimation.’
‘Well we don’t want too many of them father. We need to be sure.’
Now he looked through the windscreen at the snow beginning to fall feeling the tension increasing until he felt almost sick with it. Momentarily he lost the reasons for them being there. He was scared of his son’s reaction, worried that he might not be able to control him. In the end he did not trust David being able to restrain himself. His son had spent years preparing for this moment and now it had come he was straining to get on with it. Leon could tell how much he wanted this, to finally confront the one man who represented all the horror, to let Brucker know he had not got away with the killing. And yet for Leon it was not so simple. So much time had passed and with it the full force of what he had experienced. He did not want any more violence, any more death, but knew that given the chance that’s just what his son was seeking. He was lost between his own confusion and trying to limit David’s actions.
‘He’s there, fourth floor, flat two,’ was David’s information when he came back, ‘He’s there father. Let’s just hope he’s not taken some long retirement holiday.’
Back at the hotel Leon had a sleep in the afternoon. He knew he had to go with David back to Brucker’s street that evening. He had promised him he would follow what they had agreed, but Leon still did not trust him sufficiently to let him go off by himself. David was too worked up. He told his father he would be using the hotel gym that afternoon while he took his nap, but even then Leon was not sure that was what his son would really do. David was only twenty nine. He had all the energy needed, that and an obvious physical strength. There was an eagerness now that Leon found exhausting. Part of him even regretted coming at all. He was not ready, not driven like David. The past had seen too much death for him to ever want more, death following death. He could not imagine causing pain even to Brucker, to the one he detested more than anyone. Revenge had been mellowed to something verbal. Yes he wanted to confront Brucker, but did not believe that it would have that much effect on the German. He would be too clever, too confident. Yes the attempt was necessary. That would have to be enough. What he was not sure of was whether it would be for his son.
The snow continued throughout the day giving a thin covering over the road in Brucker’s street. There were few vehicles which had left tyre tracks, only a delivery van while Leon and David had been waiting, and two limousines that disappeared up the drive of one of the houses. They had parked further down the street from the apartment block, but there was enough street lighting to be able to see its entrance. They decided to wait no more than an hour. The quietness of the street was an unforeseen problem. The two of them sitting there was obvious but unavoidable. They had to find out what Brucker did through the day if their plan was to work.
A taxi came along the street and stopped at the entrance to the apartment block. Leon and David were suddenly paying more attention until they watched an elderly lady with too many shopping bags struggle out of the taxi and into the entranceway. After that there was little activity. The street seemed to merge into a quiet winter’s evening, the snow falling through the beams of the street lights that accentuated the twisted bare branches of the line of trees on either side.
Leon thought how Brucker had found himself a smart, expensive, almost exclusive place to live. He had been successful. Whatever had happened in the war had obviously had no effect on the rest of his life, from officer to company director, looking still sharp and purposeful in the newspaper photograph, Franz Brucker after over thirty years in a thriving sports business had at last retired, the occasion celebrated by a function at one of the top hotels in Hamburg. Like David he had spent years studying the nature of the Wehrmacht officers who were directly involved in extermination. There had been so many of them. On two brief glimpses Leon knew it was impossible to fully understand who that person was, the character of Brucker, and yet he still believed he had explored enough material to give him some sense of this man. He looked fit for his age and he would have worked on that. There would be an inner confidence, an assurance about him. Leon doubted that he would have got married. Brucker would not be the type to share his life with anybody. He would be totally focused, willing himself to complete whatever task he had set himself. The article in the newspaper had said he enjoyed walking in the Alps which again Leon could imagine, again the emphasis on health and fitness, a man of nearly seventy still going up mountains. For so long he had tried to get close to who Brucker was, to understand the possible contradictions there might be in a man with his personality, somebody who could watch the worst kind of butchery he had ordered and finish up as a successful businessman, somebody who must be able to get on with other people, to be admired, to be able to stimulate. Was this the man they were dealing with? He would be clever, secretive, always one step ahead. David had discussed what would happen when Brucker refused to get into the car.
‘We have to use some kind of pressure father or he’ll just walk away.’
‘I don’t know David,’ had been his weak response, again unsure how far his son wanted to go to ensure that the German did as he was told.
‘Some kind of force, I’ll have to do that or we’ll look complete fools. What, please would you kindly get in this car please with two complete strangers. I hardly think so.’
Leon knew he was right. It would take more than words to get Brucker to do anything. Even if he was an old man he would still resist. It was David who had the strength to change that, which meant they had to depend on some sort of violence, something that worried Leon more than anything else. He knew he had to accept a certain use of force, but that seemed to him to only undermine the reasons for what they were doing, violence begetting more violence. Brucker would see it as a weakness. His compliance then would mean nothing.
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It was early next morning when they had got their first sighting. It was David’s idea to get to the street by six o clock when nobody was around, to find a good position for the car which they parked underneath one of the trees on the other side from Brucker’s apartment block. Fifteen minutes later they saw a figure appear from the entranceway in tracksuit and trainers with a woolly hat on. The man stopped and checked his watch before starting to slowly jog along the pavement towards them.
The snow had stopped, leaving a frozen, clear morning as they watched the figure come into the light of the street lamp. In that moment Leon knew it was Brucker, that glimpse of the side view of his face. Even though he had the woolly hat pulled far down Leon could see enough of his profile to recognise the German.
‘Well?’ asked David as they watched the figure jog to the far end of the street.
‘Yes,’ said Leon.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’
‘It’s Brucker?’
‘Yes.’
The figure disappeared leaving both of them tense and relieved at the same time.
‘Out for a run at this time in the morning.’
‘I bet he does this every day. Did you see how fit he seemed? That’s Brucker,’ said Leon, ‘still in control, still defying the odds.’
‘A bachelor.’
‘I think so. I could never imagine him being married. It would mean sacrificing too much.’
‘We’ll have to go. If we stick around too long he or somebody else will notice. This looks like a place where security is taken seriously. Somebody will be watching.’
Back in the hotel after breakfast David went again to the gym and Leon out to look for an English newspaper.
‘Where will all this lead eventually?’ had been one of Rachel’s regular worries.
As he crossed the road on his way to the main station he thought again of their life together with its moments of happiness often overwhelmed by their difficulties usually centred on their son. She had died of cancer at the age of fifty two. He could see her wasted features in the hospital bed with such sunken eyes that still seemed to be questioning him. Even then she was pleading for him to help David.
‘He’s living it all over again, for you. He’s doing this for you.’
It was his constant regret. He had allowed his own needs to dominate their time together, needs that his son had taken on so readily until he became the shadow of his father’s experience. David had become the surrogate survivor. They had hunted the past and now they had found some of it, alive and well in an expensive suburb of an expensive city.
The station was a perfect example of how the Germans had adapted the old to the modern. All that had been left after the war was the station’s entrance wall. Behind that they had built a glass dome and underneath smart restaurants and cafes on the edge of the main concourse. It worked so well that all Leon could do was stand and admire before watching one of the sleek Ice trains push its way silently between platforms.
In London everything was a struggle to merge the old and new whereas here there was no such conflict. The Germans understood the modern, its architecture, its style. They had the advantage of starting with a clean sheet and on it had created a city that retained the best of its rebuilt classical buildings with the smooth, glass and steel edifices of the last decades of the twentieth century. Standing there in the station he felt the depth of Germany’s resurgence. The power had returned but this time it was more positive. It was only the fact that men such as Brucker lived on that tarnished this so changed image.
They took the off chance to drive over at lunchtime. This time they saw him with rucksack over his shoulder. It was the same the following day, watching him coming along the pavement in the late afternoon. By then they knew enough of his routine.
‘I think early would be best. There’s nobody around and hopefully Brucker won’t be at his sharpest,’ David said.
They were in Leon’s room after dinner in the hotel’s restaurant.
‘He’ll always be at his sharpest. That’s the nature of the man,’ Leon answered wearily.
He was tired from all the watching and the growing tension. His body had all its aches and his head felt like a block of lead had been shoved between his eyes. Now his room was too cold. The hotel management had apologised for the overheating only to create its opposite. There were frost patterns over the window. They were both sat in their overcoats looking at a map of Northern Germany.
‘This is the nearest forest area. We need to try and disorientate him.
‘I want it in a forest,’ Leon said then, ‘It has to be in a forest.’
‘We’ve decided father.’
‘But just to talk. We’ll try in English first. You say his company has outlets all over Europe.’
David suddenly shouted, ‘Yes! Yes! We’ve been through this I don’t know how many times. Personally I’d like to kill the bastard for all he’s done. I’d like to put a bullet right in the middle of his forehead. That’s what he deserves.’
‘Of course that’s what he deserves. But this in the end is not about him David. This is for us and all those who died.’
‘I know.’
‘So we follow the plan.’
‘Yes.’
‘You promise?’
David tried to smile as he said, ‘Another promise. But it depends on Brucker. If he starts being smart then I’ll have no compulsion about smacking him in the face. I don’t care how old the bastard is. That’s what he’ll get.’
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Leon could not sleep. He lay there doubting whether he could go through with what they had planned. He was an old Jew who owned an art gallery. He was a survivor who had passed on the disease of its guilt to his son and in so doing had lost the respect of his wife. He believed in humanist values, hated all forms of violence. He wanted to retire from the art business to try a little art for himself, water colours of some Mediterranean scenery, sketches of the hilltop towns of Tuscany, places that he loved and wanted to capture. It no longer mattered about talent. He would just enjoy the act of putting something on paper.
He lay there scared. David still had no idea of how riddled with anxiety he was. Brucker was the soldier, the killer, the one who could destroy life. How had his family died Leon often wondered. Was Brucker there watching as usual? Had it been the walk out into the forest to stand at the edge of the pit to be shot in the back of the head? Is that what had happened? Had Brucker organised that? To see his mother and father and Hella topple forward after the sudden jerk of death. But not Uncle David, he would have killed himself first. He would have drunk enough and then done it in the back of his tavern like he always said he would. Still all of it came back to Brucker. Leon wanted to hate him. He wanted no restraint. Tomorrow would fail unless he could build up enough strength, enough determination to see it through.
‘You’re a Jew Leon, ‘Rachel had said, ‘And Jews live by the word. You’ve always emphasised that. But that can never be enough, never, especially not for our son. That’s what you’ve done, created somebody who will get things finished, who will do what you can’t. How does that feel? How does that feel Leon? Why don’t you answer me, come on Leon. Answer me.’
He turned over to listen to the late night traffic. This was the land of the enemy with its shiny new cities and white flashed bullet trains. This was Brucker’s land, successful, ready for any future, its people with the same old qualities of strength, fortitude, efficiency, the hidden arrogance of never failing. Germany was once again a power house. It had turned violence into capitalism. It had become once again Europe’s leader. It had been the myth of the Jew that for any country to really succeed it needed the sons of Israel to be at the centre of its decisions. That had been nonsense. Hitler had proved it.
The strain was beginning to make him feel sick. How could he play such a role? Now was the time
to save the last member of his family from this man. He was not going to have yet another victim. Whatever happened Leon knew he had to make sure that he did not lose his son. That was the easiest decision of all. He owed it to all those who had died. He owed everything to them.
CHAPTER 16
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Franz thought he was ready. He had decided to go on with his usual routine and see what happened, putting on his tracksuit, trainers and woolly hat. He locked his apartment door and put the keys into the plant pot on the next landing. Opening the main door he was hit by the freezing air. It made him immediately more alert, looking for the mysterious car. But it was still dark. The street lights did not illuminate everything. There were still large areas of shadow over the pavement and road. But his mind was focused, taking in every piece of information it could as he came down the path and then started to jog.
So when the car door opened across the pavement blocking his way he almost was prepared for it.
‘Herr Brucker,’ the younger of the two Jews said, ‘Franz Brucker.’
He had expected words but not the next sudden move as the Jew grabbed him by the arm and swung him towards the car.
‘Get in,’ he was told.
‘What the....?’ he tried before his head was pushed down and then he was shoved so hard he finished up sprawling over the back seat. In an instant the Jew was beside him and the car was in motion. Before he could even sit up he was grabbed again and tape was stuck over his mouth. His head was pushed down on the seat and after a struggle his hands were taped behind his back.
