Toronto was still three hours away. He would change planes there for the final sixteen hundred miles west over the Great Lakes of Huron and Superior and the prairies of Manitoba then to its capital, Winnipeg.
Hang on, little friend. Keep pretending.
That is what Francis would say.
*
Arie Minsky’s morning exercise for his gammy leg was to walk from his house to an Arab café near the green-domed Great Mosque of Akko. They served cold lemonade with mint and he would sit across from its stone-flagged courtyard and listen to the doves and sparrows in the waving palms. A muezzin summoned the faithful to prayer from the tapering minaret which dominated this city of a thousand years and more. It was April and the air was sultry and scented by the blossoms of pomegranate and henna.
Arab women, head-to-toe in black, flowed like liquid between the bazaar’s silken cascades of rainbow-coloured dresses, shivering on racks in a breeze from the pewter sea. Akko’s ancient city walls had never been high enough to repel the ships of the invader... Greeks and Romans, Crusaders, Turks and the British all came, conquering and killing. In these times, Jews learned that whoever does not want to be defeated has no option but to attack.
Minsky was untroubled by this philosophy early on. It was his own, and that of the Irgun – and therefore, his fellow saboteurs, hanged by the British from a girder in an Ottoman citadel just along Al-Jazzar Street. But if their blood had irrigated the nascent state of Israel, all the ensuing wars of survival gradually undid the psyches of those living under the constant threat of death
Yet to admit such a psychological cost would be to appear weak, uncertain that the cause was right. So any emotional damage to Arie Minsky and those like him was held within their heads till in time, what remained became so brittle it could collapse at the slightest touch.
He finished his drink. An important phone call was expected and he needed to get home through the hewn-out passageways and lanes of the old city. Here was shade but heat, too, places where the scent of flowers gave way to wood smoke and sewage and the snarling of emaciated cats, fighting in the dirt for their lives.
*
McCall met Ted Cleeve in The Second Cup coffee shop in central Winnipeg. Cleeve came over as an irreverently cynical soul. They talked first about stories they had covered and bastards who crossed them. It was a ballet of the bullshitters, each weighing up how much to trust the other. Cleeve only got to the point as they walked to the city’s main library under a granite-grey sky threatening snow from the Rockies.
‘OK, McCall. Here’s what I know. The cops tell us a guy’s strung himself up in his garage out in this little town, Carmen – miles from any damn place. A bunch of us reporters head out there to interview the wife who found him. Ella Virbalis she was called. Pretended not to speak English though we knew she was a clerk in a furniture store downtown in Winnipeg.’
‘Maybe she was in shock, Ted. Must’ve been pretty grim to find him like that.’
‘Yeah, sure. Anyway, her daughter’s there and we’re getting nowhere and it’s all a bit tense. The kid wants us to go so I ask to use the bathroom. When I come out, I’m on my own with the wife and I snatch a last question – why did she think her husband would kill himself?’
‘And what did she say?’
‘It takes her off guard. She stops dabbing her eyes and stares at me and says in English, “He didn’t. My Yanis didn’t tie the knot himself. He’d have left me a note”.’
‘Maybe she needed to believe he wouldn’t do such a thing. Made it easier to bear.’
‘No, McCall. I was there. She meant it, believe me. She knew... like she knew immediately she should’ve kept her mouth shut to me.’
‘But you asked her what she meant, yes?’
‘Sure I did but she looks real scared and pushes me out the door.’
‘What about the police investigation? Was this a lead they followed up?’
‘You’re joking – those guys couldn’t find a cat up a tree back then.’
‘But there must have been an inquest.’
‘Of course but the cops haven’t found any evidence of any foul play so everyone agrees old Yanis Virbalis finished himself off for reasons no one could figure out.’
The library’s file copies of the Winnipeg Free Press from the autumn of 1960 told of espionage and paranoia – US spy planes over the Soviet Union, Polaris nuclear subs operating out of Britain and a political crisis developing in Cuba.
They were dangerous days but history already. McCall found Cleeve’s story, buried below the fold on an inside news page.
The widow of a Lithuanian-born man found hanged in his garage told the Free Press that she did not think her husband would have killed himself.
‘Yanis wouldn’t have tied the knot’ said Mrs Ella Virbalis at her home on 9th Street, Carman.
The couple, who have a 14 year old daughter, Rosa, came to Canada as penniless immigrants after the war to build a new life. Mr Virbalis, aged 55, worked at the railroad depot in Carman where his colleagues said he was well liked and had no reason to take his life that they knew of.
Mrs Virbalis, employed three days a week as a clerk at Wilson’s furniture store in Main Street, Winnipeg insisted if her husband had intended to kill himself, he would have left a note. She telephoned him less than two hours before she found his body when he seemed in good spirits, according to Mrs Virbalis. Police are carrying out an investigation and would not comment further.
The story carried a single column photograph of Virbalis. It was the eyes which caught the attention – deep-set and dark, too close together under such a wide forehead. He had cropped hair, receding, jug ears and full rather full, womanish lips. Beyond that, he was an unmemorable face in the crowd.
But McCall recognised him immediately. He was in Bea’s photograph – the one showing the nine Nazi soldiers. Virbalis had stood next to Wilhelm Frank, the wood carver... in whose skeletal hand the exact same picture had been found.
More than that, Yanis Virbalis was the man Francis had filmed in his final reel.
Chapter Thirty Two
‘Despite all your suspicions, the story didn’t make much of a splash, Ted.’
‘Too damn right, it didn’t. I was pretty sore about that and told the City Desk, too.’
‘But Mrs Virbalis couldn’t ever prove it wasn’t suicide, could she?’
‘She couldn’t or wouldn’t?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, the cops kept asking her why she’d said to me it wasn’t suicide but she refused to tell them.’
McCall watched Cleeve having breakfast of barbecued smokies in the echoing, marble departure hall of Union Station. The old reporter was due to catch a train to Calgary where his brother was in hospital. McCall looked washed out after a sleepless, jet-lagged night in a truckers’ motel. But he livened up when Cleeve produced another notebook on the Virbalis story.
‘I’ve written here that a Customs source told me about Virbalis and his wife landing in Halifax, Nova Scotia by boat from Genoa in 1947. From what he said to our authorities, he was escaping the communists who’d taken over Lithuania from the Nazis and who were just as bad. This says he’d been a factory worker before the war and was forced into a kind of local militia by the Germans against his will then posted as a guard or an orderly at various camps but when the war ended and the commie tanks rolled in, they were killing his fellow countrymen on any pretext and as his wartime background would’ve suggested he was a willing collaborator, that would’ve been enough to put him up against a wall.’
‘So the Canadians let him stay?’
‘Sure – him and thousands of others with their cockamamie stories from Europe.’
They walked to the platform and stood by Cleeve’s carriage.
‘What else makes you think Virbalis’s death was suspicious, Ted?’
‘Apart from his wife being terrified when I spoke to her?’
‘Or mistaken.’
‘Well, they’d no money worries, the marriage wasn’t in bad shape, the daughter was bright enough at school and they’d a vacation planned.’
‘People under stress do crazy things on the spur of the moment.’
‘This guy wasn’t under any stress, McCall.’
‘Not that we know of.’
‘No, but then there was the undertaker.’
‘What undertaker?’
‘Maybe a year later, I met the undertaker who’d collected Virbalis’s body and we got to talking and he told me that our friend had shat himself.’
‘What’s unusual about that if someone’s hanged?’
‘The undertaker said in his experience, only those poor mutts who were about to be executed shat themselves because they lose all control through fear. Suicides don’t.’
‘So did you write a follow-up piece about this?’
‘No, my paper didn’t think it would be in the public interest.’
‘Christ, Ted – why ever not?’
‘Some decision upstairs, I guess. If he’d been bumped off, that’d just draw attention to all the other Nazis we’d let in and the Russians would’ve exploited this for their anti-west propaganda. It was the Cold War back then – remember?’
Cleeve heaved himself on board and stood wheezing a little by the open window. The train began to move. McCall trotted by the side, still asking questions.
‘Look, even if you’re right, why was Virbalis singled out?’
‘Like I said, I’ve no idea.’
‘He was a nothing, a nobody.’
‘Not to someone, he wasn’t.’
‘But why kill him?’
‘You tell me, Mac. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?’
*
McCall hired a big, lazily sprung Chrysler and set off through an ugly urban sprawl of lumber yards and muffler companies then out into open country for the fifty mile drive south to Carman.
Time and history had closed over the death of Yanis Virbalis like grass on a grave. Kennedy became president, man walked on the moon. And Ella herself died from throat cancer, according to Cleeve.
But what of her daughter? If Cleeve was right, only Rosa could know what her mother had not dared to say.
The road was monotonously straight. McCall began to lose concentration. He was tired and felt nauseous from not bothering to eat... or subconsciously worrying about the implications of all he was bent on uncovering against Evie’s better judgement.
He stopped the car and got out. Flurries of snow crystals twisted between the corn shoots in the surrounding pan-flat fields. He hunkered down, retching till his empty stomach could take no more.
Carman, when he reached it, was a compact little town of three thousand people, descendants of Celtic settlers who had staked a claim on the winding banks of the Boyne River. He parked beneath the clock tower of its fussy Victorian library and bought chocolate and milk from a grocery store nearby.
The town’s voter records showed Yanis and Ella Virbalis occupied number 12 Ninth Street from 1955. He had gone from the list by 1961 and Mrs Virbalis two years later. No one living in Ninth Street at the time of Yanis Virbalis’s death was still registered there.
McCall booked into a guest house and fell asleep fully clothed. It was three in the afternoon, local time. The radio weather forecast – which he missed – warned of heavy snow setting in.
*
Evie suggested they both go ashore at Piraeus but Bea shook her head and wrote out a message and telephone number on her pad instead. Bea indicated that Evie must find a post office and have an international operator connect her to the number at noon precisely. A man would answer. She should read out only what Bea had written and say nothing else.
After Evie left, Bea went to her bunk, wearier than she thought. First, Germany, now Canada. Mac was ruining the future – for himself, for Garth, maybe even his life with Evie. It could only be Francis’s jealous doing. Only he could have put Mac on this demented, destructive path. But she had taken steps, now. Nothing more could be done. Bea closed her eyes. Through the open porthole, she heard the sea and sensed herself being lulled back to the womb, innocent of all sin.
*
McCall woke early. There was no sunrise. The dawn sky simply became a less dirty shade of grey as the blameless, uneventful town stirred beyond his curtains.
He ate eggs and ham then drove to Ninth Street. The house where Yanis and Ella Virbalis had lived with Rosa was small and brick-built, the only one in a street of forty or so to be screened all round by cottonwoods and spruce, like a witch’s cottage with something to hide.
These were modest homes, mainly timber-clad and painted in pinks, greens and yellows faded and flaking in the extremes of Manitoba’s weather. Decent, dependable people lived here, blue-collar workers tending their unfenced lawns and raising their kids just right. In the distance, beyond a row of Dutch elms, McCall saw a sentinel grain elevator by the railroad track. Everywhere was tranquil and neighbourly.
It remained exactly as Francis had filmed it.
McCall started doing the shoe leather – knocking on every door in the street. All he got was colder by the minute. No one knew anything. No one remembered anything. Someone said his English accent was real neat. A girl asked if he had ever met the Queen. By mid morning, the entire street had been canvassed for no gain.
But the young couple at the Virbalis house let him see inside the garage. He stood for a moment, trying to imagine what might have happened amid the ladders and planks and tins of old paint. It must have been a miserable place to die.
McCall walked back to his car, despondent, Evie’s warnings repeating in his head. Then a woman he had spoken to earlier called him from her front door.
‘Hey, mister – there’s someone I’ve thought of.’
‘Someone who knows what happened back then?’
‘She could do, yeah. An old lady who lived round here for years.’
‘Where is she now?’
‘A care home across town. She’s blind, though.’
‘Doesn’t matter. She’s my kind of witness. What’s her name?’
‘Miss Deware.’
*
Eunice Deware was closer to eighty than seventy, snow-haired and as thin as her white stick. She wore a long plain dress the colour of a mouse’s back with a knitted cardigan to match. Miss Deware was rarely visited. Someone calling on her from the BBC in London raised her profile real high. Such a day merited tea being brought on a silver tray as Miss Deware held court.
‘We’d no scandals in Ninth Street before... no need of the Mounties, not us.’
‘Did you know the Virbalis family well, Miss Deware?’
‘Well enough. Quiet sort of folks they were, good neighbours if you’d needed them.’
‘So what happened must have been a shock. What sort of man was Mr Virbalis?’
‘Not afraid of hard work, he wasn’t. Railroad man.’
‘Why do you think he killed himself?’
‘Mental problems, they said. Couldn’t cope with what life threw at him.’
‘What a tragedy. Do you know what became of his daughter?’
‘Rosa? Went away after her mother died. Nothing to stay for, had she?’
‘Where did she go... do you know?’
‘Brandon, I think. That’s where they said. Became a teacher, I know that.’
‘At a school in Brandon itself?’
‘Maybe. But then the last I heard, she’d moved to Elm Creek.’
McCall thanked her and stood up to leave. But Miss Deware was not finished.
‘Why’s all this of interest to you over in England?’
‘It’s something to do with the war, Miss Deware.’
‘The war? He wasn’t on our side, you know, not that Mr Virbalis. My roomer told me that.’
‘Your roomer... you mean your lodger?’
‘Yes, my roomer. They came from the same place. Some communist country now.’
‘Real
ly? What was your roomer’s name?’
‘Can’t rightly remember. He wasn’t with me long but they worked on the railroad together. He’d sit over there with Mr Virbalis most evenings, playing chess, talking about the old country, I expect.’
‘Did the police come and take a statement from your roomer?’
‘He never said. Anyway, he was gone soon after. Just upped and left.’
‘And you can’t remember who he was?’
‘No... .but I remember one thing. His accent sounded more like an Englishman’s than someone from wherever he came from.’
*
McCall shivered in his parked car, engine running, trying to keep warm. He felt sick again but doubted it was from hunger this time.
He was alone, five thousand miles from base, not a step nearer his real mother and father but about to assign his adoptive parents into a conspiracy to murder. He was now sure they and Arie Minsky were too close to be innocent in the suspicious deaths of the three ex-Nazis.
Bea was with Francis in Germany when he secretly filmed Wilhelm Frank, the wood carver, then in Canada immediately before Yanis Virbalis’s apparent suicide. McCall was certain Minsky was in the street footage of Jakob Rösler and outside Frank’s workshop, too. The identity of old Miss Deware’s lodger was hardly a mystery.
He could understand why a Jew might wish every Nazi dead – even now, forty years after the death camps were liberated.
Who amongst us – Jew or not – could have walked amidst such sights of wickedness and not felt a great rage, a primitive human urge to punish those responsible? He had heard of Allied soldiers doing just that – shooting Nazi guards out of hand. But after the blood had cooled, after Nuremberg and all its juridical accounting, what was stalking an enemy for years to bring about his death but murder?
Two more questions defied answers. Why had the Wrenns colluded with Minsky? And why, from beyond death itself, had Francis implicated himself and Bea in what might be murderous acts of revenge?
A Place Of Strangers Page 21
