Read A Place Of Strangers Online
Authors: Geoffrey Seed
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 eliminated.
‘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 knew 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.