I enjoyed our supper. Can we meet at my office next Wednesday morning at 10? We can conclude the business I mentioned to you. The enclosed sealed packet is from your guardian who left me instructions to post it to you exactly a fortnight after his death. I have no idea what is in it so I hope he has left some explanation of his own.
He hadn’t. Inside, McCall found four more reels of cine film which Francis had labelled A, B, C, and D in red felt tip pen.
With them was a large black and white photograph of a well-dressed, intelligent-looking man with a small swastika badge in his left lapel. Beyond that, the package was empty. Francis never lacked a sense of theatre.
McCall did what he knew he was meant to and hurried down to the dacha. The first cassette was Super 8 with integral sound. McCall laced it in and the screen showed a locked-off shot of Francis’s leather armchair by the pot-bellied stove. Someone could be heard moving behind the tripod. Then Francis walked into view and sat down. He looked at the camera, fiddling with his glasses like a politician about to do an election broadcast – but in gardening clothes and from a shed.
Bit awkward this, Mac... know you’ll understand, though. Couple of things I want to get straight with you. First off, if we’d been able to have a son, you’re just the sort of chap I’d have wanted... we had some good times, didn’t we? A few larks and stories and I only wish I’d been around more in the early days and we could’ve spent longer together. Anyway, wasn’t to be. Drawn a veil over most of those times, now. Best thing, too... not that anyone’s going to let a scribbler like you get wind of them.
I’ve not always been proud of some of the things I’ve been involved in... bit late to make amends now, I know. But see what you can make of these bits of home movies I’ve asked old Fewtrell to send onto you. I had some others once upon a time but can’t seem to keep track of everything. Still, you always liked a challenge and these’ll give you that, all right.
Steer clear of the Official Secrets Act if you can and all those silly buggers in bowler hats who go round snooping. Never liked them... anyway, that’s about it. Good luck in life, Mac... goodbye, little friend.
Francis half smiled and began to rise out of his chair. He was stopped by a final thought, one last little message.
Don’t forget me, Mac... will you ? I’ve always tried to do my best. Remember me...
He moved out of frame to switch off the camera. McCall stayed where he was, unable to see anything else, anyway.
Chapter Twenty Seven
McCall ran a deep bath in the roll top tub. The wall mirror misted over but he could just about glimpse the nakedness of someone he once knew... an edgier man than he remembered, skin drawn tight across the crib of his chest and a heart yet to heal. He sank into the warm, amniotic darkness.
Why? It was always the most important of questions.
Francis’s message from beyond the grave he understood... but why had he willed him the riddle of this other footage? Francis was always a camera nut but why had this material been shot?
McCall dressed then packed his Moroccan leather overnight bag. Francis’s photograph of the Nazi lay on a chair. It had been credit stamped to a Berlin picture agency, Presse Bild Zentrale, Friedrich str 214 but bore no caption, name or date. The face was handsome but aloof, lit from the side so was in half shadow, accentuating the pitting caused by adolescent acne. His fair hair was parted on the right and he wore a suit of finely woven stripes with a pale shirt and a silk tie patterned in tiny triangles. McCall put him around forty – maybe a lawyer on the up, a mid-career civil servant or a party apparatchik. Not an obvious thug but no innocent, either.
And there he was in, this same man, some years older and being secretly filmed by Francis in Reel B.
What was Francis up to – and why?
He caught the Nazi walking down the steps of a municipal building in a dark overcoat. To get this tight on a target, Francis could only have hidden in a vehicle parked close by. The shot panned with the man till he disappeared behind a Mercedes convertible with a sloping grill. Two blackened church spires were visible at the very far end of a long thoroughfare of shops. The camera must then have been switched off but whether for days or weeks, it was impossible to tell.
The next pictures were taken in open country. They showed skid marks veering off a main road wet with rain, and patches of charred undergrowth by a tree.
The final sequence on Reel B was a bag job – a covert walking shot taken in a scrap yard behind a garage to reveal the burnt-out wreckage of an early Volkswagen beetle with a split rear window. McCall didn’t get it.
So he had pressed on with reels C and D.
And that was when he really sat up and took notice.
*
McCall made three phone calls before driving to Hereford for a fast train to London. He checked Bea was still improving but left no message. Then he rang a TV facilities house in Soho to book time to make several freeze frame enlargements from this new 8mm footage.
His last call was to fix a meet with Gerry Gavronski, a known and trusted contact over many years.
An almost guilty feeling of relief came over him. His own illness, Francis’s death, Bea’s lies – these stresses lifted. He was a hack again, on the road with an intriguingly good story... but one in which those closest to him were somehow involved. Yet he had no choice. To find the truth was to find himself.
Evie rang as he was about to leave.
‘I’ve got something on the missing mourner.’
‘Terrific. What?’
‘No name yet but his car is shown as belonging to the Israeli Embassy.’
‘Christ, really?’
‘Yeah, our man’s well over retirement age so he’s unlikely to be a diplomat himself but he must have connections to borrow an official Jaguar.’
Evie never let him down. McCall told himself to remember that.
*
Gerry Gavronski worked – and seemed to live – in a landfill of an office, three floors above Tottenham Court Road tube station.
He was an unmarried, overweight, poor-sighted lump of a man with an electric shock of gingery grey hair. He was a communist until Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising. His small circulation anti fascist magazine kept afloat on charitable donations and Gavronski’s own bits of journalism for his knowledge of fascism was encyclopaedic.
McCall showed him Francis’s photograph of the man with the Nazi lapel badge.
‘I’m looking for a name, Gerry – a name and anything you can come up with about this guy.’
Gavronski pushed his glasses high onto his head and stared at the picture. He began banging through the drawers of his metal filing cabinets. On the wall above Gavronski’s typewriter, McCall noticed another death threat had been pinned up since his last visit. Gavronski held to a single belief – that fascism was an ineradicable pestilence, a sort of latent Black Death. His little magazine charted any new sign of infection. For that, he had been stabbed, beaten up and had acid thrown at him.
‘So, McCall... here he is in the files. Jakob Rösler.’
He handed McCall a picture showing Francis’s Nazi addressing a meeting. A cutting from a Dusseldorf newspaper glued on the back confirmed Rösler’s name.
‘So what did Rösler do, Gerry?’
‘He was an SS officer, not that senior but dedicated enough.’
‘Dedicated to what?’
‘To killing people, of course. That’s what they did. That was their purpose.’
Gavronski sat back, eyes closed affectedly as if about to give a tutorial. McCall took the cue and began scribbling in his notebook.
Summer, ’41... systematic SS sweep... Minsk, Bialystok, Lvov, Vilna, Kovno. Jews killed wherever found. Most shot. Other atrocities – some pumped with water till exploded, others forced into buildings, burned alive. SS men in units of ten called Einsatzgruppen. Very mobile. Aided by local collaborators, militiamen. In Lithuania, raids by Einsatzkommando 3. By December, 200,000 Lith. Jews el
iminated.
‘And was Rösler somehow involved in all this?’
‘From memory, I think he played some organisational role, yes.’
‘So he wasn’t actually on the front line... pulling the trigger?’
‘I can’t be sure but you must remember, it didn’t take an education to shoot a queue of naked women and children but it needed lots of logistical brains to get the killers in place to do it.’
‘Have you any idea what happened to Rösler later?’
‘On this I am hazy but I think he was captured quite a while after the war.’
‘Any idea what happened to him after that?’
‘He’d have got hard labour but he wouldn’t have been locked up for long.’
‘Yet he was a murderer, in effect?’
‘As were thousand of others and for them, not even a parking ticket.’
Gavronski went back to his filing cabinets and retrieved a sheet of paper.
‘One of these bastards kept a diary that came to light years later. I’ve long given up trying to fathom the minds of such individuals but you try if you want.’
He handed McCall a translation of an Einsatzgruppen man’s entry for July 14th 1941.
We go into the woods and look for a suitable place for mass execution. We order the prisoners to dig their graves. What can they be thinking? I believe each has the hope of not being shot. I don’t feel the slightest stir of pity. That is how it is and has got to be. Slowly, the grave gets bigger and deeper.
The grind of traffic along Oxford Street faded to nothing. McCall heard only the scuff of polished boots in the soft sandy floor of a pine forest, a shouted order and the whimpering of those about to die.
Money, watches and valuables are collected. The women go first.
McCall imagined the iron echoes of gunfire and the flap of wings as birds lifted in panic from the tops of trees then circled the pit below.
The shooting goes on. Two heads have been shot off. Nearly all fall into the grave unconscious only to suffer a long while. The last group have to throw the corpses into the grave. They have to stand ready for their own execution. They all tumble into the grave.
How obedient everyone was... compliant, even. No revolt, no attempt to rush the firing squad and tear at those bored faces and die content. Just a queue. An orderly queue as if for a bus. No one causing any trouble.
‘So, Mac – what’s your interest in Rösler?’
Gavronski was a long time on the earth and McCall would not insult him with a lie... not a big one, anyway.
‘I’ve been given some information but I don’t know where it’s leading me.’
‘But why’s it come to you?’
‘Good question, Gerry. If I find out, you’ll be the first I’ll tell.’
‘You know Rösler didn’t die in bed, don’t you?’
McCall glanced up, trying not to appear overly intrigued.
‘No, I didn’t. What happened to him?’
‘A car crash, I think.’
‘When was that?’
‘Early fifties, mid fifties, something like that. I’d have to check.’
‘Was there anything unusual about it?’
‘What an odd question. It was a car crash. Why should you think otherwise?’
McCall blanked him with a grin then wrote a cheque for £75 and put it between the rollers of Gavronski’s typewriter.
‘A donation, Gerry.’
Then he told him about trying to trace the mourner who had attended Francis’s funeral in an Israeli Embassy car. Gavronski had friends in such places.
‘Is this connected to Rösler in some way?’
‘No, Gerry. This is strictly a family matter.’
Sometimes, only a fib will do.
*
The pissy reek of cannabis hung about the cutting room where Evie met up with McCall in Soho. She did not approve of him smoking dope nor did she buy into his irrational excitement about the footage Francis had bequeathed him. He was under great emotional strain – and it showed. He was an obsessive by nature. But he was searching for patterns or answers in something he had been left by a man whose mind was lost. Evie also sensed it somehow threatened Bea and that bothered her.
‘You must keep a sense of proportion, McCall. Francis had dementia when he put all this together.’
‘Listen to me, will you? Look at the footage.’
She watched Reel B and agreed the blow-up freeze-frame of the man leaving the civic building and the one in the photograph could be the same – Jakob Rösler. McCall insisted the spires in the background were of the cathedral in Cologne because that was where Rösler lived just after the war. The crash site and the wrecked Volkswagen followed next.
‘And guess how Rösler died.’
‘Don’t tell me... careless driving. But you don’t know this was his car.’
‘No, not yet but just watch the screen.’
Another freeze frame came on – the face of a man Rösler passed as he came out of the civic building. McCall told her to remember this image.
Reel C played in. There was Bea with all the style of an actress on set, walking into frame with McCall as a little boy, all sparrow legs and hair like a bird’s nest. They crossed a market square hand in hand. Behind them was a vast sugar loaf of a mountain covered in fir trees.
The picture changed to the inside of a toy shop hung with puppets and dolls and wobbled through to a workshop and a young woman carving a figure in wood. The camera then panned to a bald man chiselling the face of Jesus from a large, coin-shaped piece of timber. The man looked up, but only for a moment. As he did, so the camera caught something like fear in his eyes. McCall paused the footage.
‘This reel was shot in a place called Oberammergau in Bavaria where we went for a holiday because Francis was working out there. Now look at this.’
The sequence resumed in the street outside. A man stood on the corner but only for a second or two before he moved away. McCall stopped the footage again.
‘Recognise him?’
‘No.’
‘Well look again.’
He’d had another freeze-frame blow up made of this Reel C man and ran it alongside the image of the person Rösler passed walking out of shot in Reel B.
‘They’re the same man... in both places.’
‘Come on, McCall. They’re far too indistinct to tell.’
‘Believe me. They’re the same guy – our missing mourner.’
‘Mac... it never is. What you’re saying doesn’t stand up.’
‘You said yourself he had a memorable face.’
‘Sure, but this image is all blurred. You’re seeing things because you want to see them.’
‘Francis left me this stuff for a reason, Evie. He wanted me to follow it up.’
‘McCall – his mind was skewed. He was sick. None of this truly means anything.’
A receptionist came in and said someone was on the phone for McCall. He was back a minute later, serious and calmer.
‘OK, maybe this helps. That was my contact. He says our missing mourner is an Israeli guy called Arie Minsky.’
‘Minsky? Was he a diplomat?’
‘No, not a diplomat – a war correspondent. Very well connected.’
‘But what does any of this mean, Mac?’
‘Too early to say but I can tell you something else – Minsky and Bea were lovers.’
‘How the hell do you know that?’
‘Because Mrs Bishop suggested as much... and in a way, Bea told me herself.’
‘Bea? How could she do that?’
‘By her reaction when I showed her his photograph.’
‘You heartless sod, McCall. She’s ill – ’
‘– she’s always been tougher than she looks. But she wouldn’t tell me his name.’
‘I don’t blame her.’
‘Maybe not but she knew I’d recognised it if she did.’
‘How would you do that?’
‘Because I k
new him as Uncle Harry when I was little. I’d just forgotten his face.’
McCall played her the last of the three mute cassettes, Reel D. His notes read: high angle cityscape, pans l to r / low rise office blocks / big advert for Garry Finance Corporation on wall of medium skyscraper / Odeon Cinema / cars driving on r h side / feels 50s-60s America / location change / camera in bag / suburban street, trees, white clapboard houses, tended gardens / railroad track / grain silo / man getting into car / same man hailed by cameraman, points (maybe giving directions) drives away.
‘I didn’t spot your Mr Minsky.’
‘Maybe not. But he’ll be there... wherever it is.’
Evie had not seen McCall’s journo blood lust before. It was not attractive. The story was everything and he would get it. She did not doubt that. His callousness frightened her. It took no account of casualties along the way – especially those on his own side.
‘What are you going to do, now?’
‘I’m going to go to Germany.’
‘No, you can’t do that, Mac. Please don’t.’
‘I have to. That’s where the evidence leads.’
‘Think about what this could do to Bea. She doesn’t deserve any of this.’
‘Maybe not. Then again, neither did I.’
Chapter Twenty Eight
Rösler’s death was reported in a regional paper, Schwäbische Zeitung, in March 1955. A young assistant in the Dusseldorf library saw McCall struggling with a pocket dictionary so volunteered to help with his research.
Later on, he bought coffee in a pavement café and re-read his note of the translation.
A businessman, Jakob Rösler, had a fatal car accident with his wife yesterday on the autobahn south of Düsseldorf where they lived. The police say that for as yet unexplained reasons, their Volkswagen crossed the median line, narrowly missing other traffic, and crashed into a tree on the other side. Through the force of the collision, Herr Rösler’s car caught fire and his wife was thrown thirty metres. Both were pronounced dead at the scene. They leave a son, Theo.
Those five words – for as yet unexplained reasons – gave McCall reason to be cheerful.
He watched the strolling passers-by... the elegant, the fashionable and the elderly in whose name the Nazis put the feeble minded to death to supposedly rid the Reich of all its social undesirables – Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists.
A Place Of Strangers Page 18
