McCall had no choice but to press on. Like the scorpion who stung the frog while being rescued from a flood, it was what he did. He drove back to Ninth Street and retraced the steps Francis must have taken to film the service lane behind Virbalis’s house. His death – like Wilhelm Frank’s – could not have been brought about by Minsky alone. Their targets were Einsatzgruppen men who knew no other trade but killing. Neither would have gone quietly to the slaughter as their victims were tricked into doing. They would have fought like the dogs they were.
Yet somehow, they had been subdued, made quiescent. If Minsky left by Virbalis’s front door and returned to Miss Deware’s as usual that day, his accomplice could have hidden in the carigana bushes in the back lane till dark then crossed the fields beyond to be picked up by someone in a car.
McCall mapped out a route to Elm Creek. He could be there before nightfall. If Miss Deware was right, Rosa Virbalis should not be hard to find. As he drove away, he had no reason to notice a man getting into another car and following him at a distance.
Chapter Thirty Three
McCall was half asleep and laid out across the Chrysler’s bench seat when someone started banging the driver’s door window with a bunch of keys. At that moment, he had no idea where he was or what he was doing. It was nearly dark but he could see a woman staring from the other side of the glass. McCall stumbled out of the car almost freeze-dried and fell at her feet.
‘Sorry, sorry. Didn’t mean to frighten you.’
The woman was Rosa Virbalis, gripping a tyre lever in her fist. He pulled out his Scotland Yard press pass for her to check the ID photograph.
‘I’ve nothing to say to any reporters.’
‘You don’t know why I’ve come.’
‘Don’t bet the farm on it, mister.’
The arctic cold immediately bit through McCall’s thinly padded anorak. He began shivering so badly, it affected his speech.
‘Not here as reporter... your life, mine... they’ve crossed.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘About your father.’
‘What about him?’
‘His story... fits into the missing... bits of mine.’
She looked at him hard, assuring herself he had not escaped from an institution.
‘You’re dressed all wrong for Canada, mister. Best come inside.’
He sat in one of the armchairs by a log burner. Rosa Virbalis left him to thaw out and went to the kitchen.
It had been easy finding her in the tiny township of Elm Creek. The man who ran the liquor store knew her well. He described what she looked like, where she worked and lived – three miles from nowhere off Highway 2.
McCall did a discreet reccy of the junior school where she taught. She was younger than him, slightly overweight and no pin-up but with pretty hair the colour of dried straw and cheeks slapped pink by the prairie wind.
Then he parked by her home, a shack of a farmstead with ice in the air and clouds pressing down on an earth gone like stone.
Rosa returned with a plate of piroshki, little pastry pockets of meat and vegetables she served with large measures of vodka. The warmth of the liquor and the stove made him want to curl up and sleep again. But Rosa was waiting. She had the palest, sea green eyes. McCall felt only pity for her, for what she must have witnessed. The sins of Yanis Virbalis were no more hers than those of Jakob Rösler were his son’s.
‘Look, this all starts with your father... how he came to die.’
‘He committed suicide. So what?’
‘Yes, he did but why did he do it?’
‘Listen, who knows... he just did. It’s years ago.’
‘But your mother never thought it was suicide, did she?’
‘How’s this relevant to anything, mister? It’s all in the past.’
‘It is but I’d guess you’re still bothered by that one question, Rosa... why he did it.’
‘Not me. It’s of no interest anymore. Life moves on and we have to move with it.’
McCall did not believe her. He doubted she did herself.
‘I’ve spoken to the newspaperman your mother talked to after she found the body.’
‘My Mom said things back then she didn’t mean.’
‘But she said them, Rosa. She said your Dad hadn’t tied the rope himself.’
‘Yeah, but for Christ’s sake, she was just upset. She’d just cut him down.’
‘No, not upset. Your mother was terrified, according to this man I’ve talked to. He said she was seriously scared of something and I want to find out what.’
Rosa returned his gaze for several seconds.
‘You know... don’t you, Rosa? You know what she had to be terrified about.’
Some sort of audit was going on in her head. She filled her glass with more vodka then without saying a word, rolled a joint.
‘It stands to reason that you do... mother and daughter together. The pair of you against the world. Who else could she tell but you?’
Rosa leaned back and watched her exhaled smoke spread across the rough planked ceiling. The wall clock struck six. She passed the joint to McCall. That was promising.
‘I’ve never talked about any of this before.’
‘No? Well, we all have need of a priest one day.’
A car drove by and she sat up nervously. McCall asked what was wrong.
‘Nothing. It’s just we don’t get cars going by this time of night.’
She opened the stove doors to put in more logs. Her cheeks burned even redder.
‘You got a wife back in England, mister... kids of your own?’
‘No. That never happened for me. What about you – married?’
‘No, still single after all these years.’
‘You must have boyfriends?’
‘One or two. No one that stays the distance.’
Rosa filled her glass again. McCall knew he only had to wait. She began at last to talk, to purge herself of what had troubled her for so long.
‘We’d had a guest speaker at school that day, the day Dad... .you know, some woman from I don’t know where, and I was one of those she got talking to afterwards. I arrived home later than usual. Mom was in the street shouting like a mad thing. I’d no idea why but I got her inside before the neighbours came out but she kept pointing to the garage so I went and looked inside and saw my Dad lying on the floor. He wasn’t moving and Mom just kept screaming so I rang for an ambulance but I knew there was no point. The police turned up and started asking questions but it was plain enough to them what’d happened. They couldn’t get much sense out of Mom because she always forgot her English when she got in a state. They asked me if he had black moods and I said sometimes he did but nothing serious, nothing medical. Then, that same night, after everyone had gone and we were on our own, the phone rang and I answered and this man came on and said, “Rosa, you listen good to me... just tell your mother that Yanis had it easier than he deserved. She’ll know what I’m talking about”. Then the phone went dead.’
‘Did you recognise his voice, the accent?’
‘No.’
‘What did your mother say when you gave her the message?’
‘She turned this deathly colour like she was having a heart attack and I kept asking what it meant but she wouldn’t tell me but she said we mustn’t say anything to anyone, not even the police, because if we did, they would come back and kill us.’
‘Who did she mean, they?’
‘She never said. Not even on her death bed.’
‘But she was terrified of them or something they might do?’
‘Yes, she was petrified.’
‘And you know why, don’t you?’
‘I’ve an idea, yes.
*
In another place, another world, the intense afternoon sun burned back off the clustered white cottages of Crete. Passengers disembarking from the Aletha Delyse at the Venetian harbour in Iraklion needed to shield their eyes.
Bea and
Evie were amongst the first ashore after the purser delivered the radio message they had been expecting. It told them to wait on the quayside for a man driving a green Mercedes. Evie, who had experienced cloak – and some dagger – delighted in knowing the frail old lady in the wheelchair had lost none of her love of intrigue.
The car arrived and they were driven through the dawdling tourists in the old town’s lime washed streets, all blood-splashed by geraniums in pots. They headed up to a private airfield in the scrub beyond where a small private jet floated like a mirage on a lake of black tarmac. Only when they were climbing above the diamond blue waters of the Sea of Crete did Evie ask where they were going.
‘Israel... my love.’
Bea had not needed her pen and pad this time. She’d had years to practice these words.
*
Rosa Virbalis sat on the end of her bed with McCall. She, too, had a cardboard memory box and held it now across her plump knees.
‘I wasn’t quite eighteen when Mom died and we had no relatives in Canada so I just had to get on with it... organise things... burial and everything. I wanted never to see Ninth Street again but I had to clear everything out of the house. I wasn’t really old enough for all this, you know... still a kid really. Most stuff went out as garbage, some stuff to a church, clothes and things. The last room was theirs... Mom and Dad’s room... where I’d heard them sometimes... you know, at night. I didn’t like being there on my own but I just about got through it.”
‘Just about?’
‘Yeah, just about.’
‘You mean something happened?’
‘I found some photographs.’
‘What of?’
‘My Dad.
‘Your Dad how?’
‘In the war.’
‘Do you want to show me?’
Rosa Virbalis stood up and gave him an envelope from the box. She had also brought the vodka bottle and topped up their glasses. She was deliberately getting drunk – not laughing or morbid drunk – just drunk, so as not to feel a thing.
The envelope contained yet another copy of Bea’s picture of the nine Einsatzgruppen men, button-bright and smart with suitcases packed and guns at the ready. Her father stood with his comrades, men about to do their duty. In no sense was Virbalis the reluctant, press-ganged orderly he claimed to Canadian immigration. Here stood a proud, well-fed Nazi volunteer. And someone had pencilled a cross on his face – just as McCall had seen on Wilhelm Frank in the photograph found in the bones of his hand.
‘Where did you get this picture, Rosa?’
‘Mom’s old handbag, hidden away with these others.’
She handed him six more photographs, each three inches square and brown like old photographs go. Mementoes for the Virbalis family album. And there is Yanis. Rifle to his shoulder, legs apart for balance. Taking aim at a queue of women. And their babies. Everyone naked at the end of the world.
Bang! Bang! You’re dead. Bang! Bang!
Such a noise there would have been. Too loud for the clicks of the camera to be heard. And the pale shapes fall through the air. Nameless and unrecorded. Into the gaping earth. Day after day, pit after pit. There was Virbalis, again. Smiling. A job well done. Virbalis and his fellow killers. Taking a break. Having a smoke. Behind them, their handiwork, already starting to bloat under God’s pleasant sun.
On the back, someone had written Schutzmann Virbalis.
‘What does that mean, Rosa?’
‘A Schutzmann was a sort of policeman.’
McCall thought of the frayed armband in the secret compartment of Bea’s bureau, its swastika and that word, Schutzmann, sewn in silver thread. How had Bea come by it? Had it belong to the killer whose daughter now stood so close to him? He could smell the vodka on her breath, the smoke of the joint in her hair. She was holding his arm, supporting herself... becoming tearful, like drunks do.
The last photograph was of Rosa as a small child, laughing in her father’s arms. There was love on both their faces as he tickled her under the chin with the very finger which had pulled the trigger of his gun.
‘You understand, now... don’t you, mister?’
‘He was killed for revenge, wasn’t he?’
‘My Mom always feared they’d come for us, too.’
‘But who?’
‘Those Jews, of course. Who else would want him dead?’
The headlights of another car swept the room and Rosa clung to McCall.
‘Nothing comes by here this late. Who is it?’
‘Maybe someone’s lost.’
‘Stay with me, mister. Please. I get so afraid.’
She put her arms around McCall’s neck and her face to his.
‘Can’t bear to be on my own... not tonight.’
Then she kissed his mouth. She wanted comfort from the stranger, wanted to be held and desired in the desolate place that had become her life. McCall understood for he knew it, too. They lay together and he did not think of Helen and chose to forget Evie for if she had come with him, this could never have happened. Then they slept. Then they dreamed.
*
McCall sees Arie Minsky playing chess with Yanis Virbalis. They sit at a kitchen table. Only a few moves have been made. But there is an end game in sight. A third figure enters, faceless and silent. He creeps up with something in his hand. It is a rope... a rope made into a noose. McCall is somehow in there, hovering above the action but powerless to intervene, to stop what he dreads is about to happen.
The rope is quickly around Virbalis’s neck. His eyes bulge and cannot take in what is happening. The table is kicked over. Rooks and pawns scatter on the floor.
Virbalis is dragged from the room like a sack. He kicks and pulls but his struggling does no good. Minsky goads him backwards with a dull-bladed butcher’s knife. Virbalis is forced to stand on a gallows made from a beer crate. The rope is secured to a beam above him.
Yanis Virbalis. Nazi collaborator.
No. Only guard.
Liar!
No, guard.
Slaughterman!
Why do you say this?
Because you are the killer of women and children.
But you’re my friend –
I spit on you.
No, we play chess.
And you have lost.
The condemned man’s arms and legs shake uncontrollably. There is a sudden stench of human waste. Virbalis moans with shame and terror. Then he pisses himself. His urine runs inside his overalls, down the wooden crate and makes a little yellow rivulet across the dusty concrete floor.
I was ordered. I had no choice in what I did.
But you have a choice now, Yanis Virbalis.
What choice do I have?
The choice of an easy death or a hard death.
McCall can smell the sour sweat on Virbalis’s face. His eyes strain and plead for the mercy he never gave.
I have money –
Keep your money. Rosa will be home soon –
Don’t harm her.
Then your wife.
Please, don’t hurt them.
I shall cut out their stomachs as you watch, Yanis Virbalis, then you will be next.
No! No! What must I do?
Arie Minsky puts his foot on the beer crate.
Come, Yanis Virbalis... you are a logical man. You know what step to take.
But I am not ready –
Then at least you have that in common with all your victims.
At that, Minsky kicks the crate away. Virbalis falls fifteen inches then jerks up on the rope with a crack. The beam shudders and empty beer bottles roll through the dancing man’s piss. The executioners melt away.
McCall is left to watch alone. He feels his soul has been stolen, he is desensitised by lawless, vengeful death. There is no satisfaction here, no peace, no justice. There is nothing. Just a dead man twisting on a rope. And the stink of shit.
*
McCall woke alone in Rosa’s bed. He had slept for twelve hours. He went d
ownstairs and found her leafing through his research notes and photographs. She looked up and smiled, as if she now had some lien over him and whatever was his – a fair swap for all she had ceded the night before.
‘There’s juice or coffee if you want.’
McCall saw she had singled out the pictures of Bea and Minsky on Westminster Bridge and laid them together on the carpet.
‘What interests you about those two?’
‘Can’t you guess?’
‘No. Tell me.’
‘This is the man used to play chess with my father.’
‘And the woman?’
‘She was the one who gave the talk at my school. If I hadn’t talked to her that night, I’d have stopped my Dad from being murdered.’
*
McCall left, promising Rosa he would return and explain. He had a vicious migraine starting and Winnipeg seemed a painful long drive away. The snowstorm threatened from the darkened sky began to swirl across the straight gravelled road in countless powdery tornadoes.
He had gone less than a mile when a black saloon came up fast in his rear view mirror. He waved it on but the driver did not overtake.
McCall was too pre-occupied to care. He now understood why Rosa’s mother had blurted out to Ted Cleeve that her husband hadn’t tied the knot himself. But how to prove a suicide was murder...
The tailing car’s headlights flooded full beam into McCall’s mirror, almost blinding him. He accelerated to get clear. Fifty five, sixty, sixty five. He knew this was too dangerous for the weather conditions. Still the maniac behind stuck close.
Then McCall felt a violent jolt in his back. The Chrysler was being rammed. His fender flew off with a rip of metal and chrome. Then the lid of the trunk shot up. His attacker smashed into him again and again, trying to flip McCall’s car into the fields. The rush of fear within him hadn’t time to turn to panic. Even as he struggled to keep control, he saw two points of light reflecting in the blizzard ahead.
McCall braked violently but not soon enough. He went into a skid and slammed into a mesmerised deer. The creature exploded. The white air filled with bloody shrapnel, bits of brain, stomach and tissue spattering the bonnet and windscreen as the Chrysler careered off the highway and became airborne.
And in that brief eternity, a memory surfaced within McCall – a memory of what had really happened in those missing freeze frames all those years before... the poppies soaking into that sun-filled cornfield, what they were and all that they had meant. His entire life had turned on what he had blanked out.
A Place Of Strangers Page 22
