Read A Place Of Strangers Online
Authors: Geoffrey Seed
‘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.’
‘Really? 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?
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.
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 –