A Place Of Strangers (21 page)

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.

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 downstairs 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.

Now he realised why.

Chapter Thirty Four

A baby, a toddler, a little boy.

What else?

A witness.

A witness to what?

To what happened.

*

This is the BBC Light Programme. It’s a quarter to
two and time for Listen with Mother. Are you sitting comfortably?

He likes this story-teller best – Daphne Oxenford. He has
even learned to say her name. Daf-en-ee-ox-en-ford. He repeats it over and over
in his head. He used to think she lived in the wireless but he looked inside
and she doesn’t. The wireless is on a shelf by the fireplace. He always sits on
a wooden stool to listen. The stool is painted green and the wireless hums and
crackles in his ear when it is switched on and the voices come out.

He likes stories. He can read, too. Mummy has taught him.
Ber-lin, Hil-ver-sum, Lux-em-berg. That’s what it says on the dial. People in
London are on the wireless. Mummy comes from London. He’s been on his own with
her today. It’s better when they are on their own.

She is washing at the sink and wearing an apron over her
skirt and a headscarf she calls a turban and puts on when she sweeps the floor.
Mummy is always sweeping the floor. It’s dirty from the mud outside but this is
not their house and the farmer won’t make it nice for them. The farm is a long
way to walk. They go there to get eggs. Sometimes Mummy cries and he gives her
a kiss when her face is wet.

She says she has headaches and they make her cry. When the
wireless story finishes, he is going to play outside. He likes playing on his
own. He never really is on his own because he makes up stories and there are
people in the stories with names and things to do which he’s heard on the
wireless.

Today is sunny. There is a bird’s nest in the hedge. He’s
going to look inside but very quietly, not to scare the bird.

Daddy comes in with his gun. His boots are muddy. Mummy asks
him to take them off outside. He shouts at her. He always shouts.

She wants to know where he has been because his food has dried
up in the oven. He says he doesn’t want any and she says it’s because he’s been
drinking so why does she bother cooking anything. Daddy shouts even louder and
says if she didn’t shout at him, he would come home. He takes some things from
underneath his big jacket and throws them on the table.

There is a rabbit and a beautiful bird with golden red
feathers and a long tail. Their eyes are like glass and he looks into them ever
so closely and can see himself very small, like someone who could live in the
wireless.

Mummy shouts at Daddy again, louder and louder. Sometimes
they smack each other and then they both cry. He has seen Daddy cry. He does
big cries and his whole body shakes and his face goes red. Then he doesn’t do
any painting for days and Mummy’s always upset then.

He touches the bird’s feathers. They’re so shiny. The
colours all change if you turn his head with your hand. The rabbit has whiskers
and soft patches of white and brown fur with blood on its nose. He doesn’t like
it when Daddy goes shooting. But he says if he doesn’t go shooting, there won’t
be anything to eat.

His gun’s very big and heavy and has two barrels. Daddy’s
holding it now. Mummy’s crying. She says he’s no good. But he’s just got us
something to eat so he must be some good. Daddy says she should have married
someone else and Mummy says she wishes she had because he is no use. They’re
both trying to smack each other again. Daddy’s smacked him lots of times.
Daddy’s boots are making dirty marks on the tiles and Mummy’s lost her slippers.

He hides under the table with his hands over his ears
because he doesn’t like this. He’s scared. He can still see them and Mummy’s
got something in her hand and is trying to scratch Daddy’s face with it. He’s
trying to push her away but she catches him and he squeals and drops the gun.

The gun falls. The gun falls onto the tiles. The gun falls
onto the tiles ever so slowly. It hits the tiles stock first. One of the
hammers jolts down. A cartridge is fired. The room detonates with noise. The
stones in the wall and the glass in the windows shake with fear.

The sound doesn’t stop. It has a life of its own. It tunnels
into his ears and roars around his skull till he can take no more. Then it all
goes quiet.

Daddy picks up his gun and runs from the kitchen. Little
particles of plaster are falling from the ceiling... .falling like snow, gently
covering the bird and the rabbit and his mother lying on the tiles she tries to
keep clean.

He is alone. He kneels by Mummy. She’s on her side. One of
her hands is stretched out, the other is across her tummy. Her fingers claw at
the floor then go still. The back of her dress and her apron are cut up like
ribbons. Red ribbons. But it’s her skin peeling off where she’s been hit by the
little lead shots in the cartridge.

That’s the end of our story today, children. We’ll
be here again tomorrow. Until then, goodbye everyone. Goodbye.

There is powdered plaster in Mummy’s hair and on her sleepy
face. He begs her to wake up. But she doesn’t. He’ll go and get help, run to
the farm, find Daddy. Someone will know what to do. He kisses Mummy’s forehead.
His lips feel dusty. He wipes them with the back of his hand then runs into the
sunshine. He passes the hedge where the bird’s nest is and the tea chest that’s
his fort and boat but there’s no one to be seen.

He is panting for breath and his head still rings with
shouts and bangs and all that he doesn’t understand. Then he sees Daddy. He
calls out but Daddy doesn’t hear. Daddy’s going to where the farmer keeps his
hay for the animals. He calls out but still Daddy doesn’t hear so he runs
towards him.

The hay bales are stacked on top of each other, higher than
a house. Daddy’s still got his gun. Something must be wrong with it because
he’s blowing into the barrels. He’s about to shout again when there’s another
bang – a bang so loud it bounces between the hills and sets all the birds
clacking and cawing into the sky.

And there is Daddy on the ground. He’s sleeping now, too.

Everywhere in the straw above him is covered in new poppies.
It’s like a field of blood-red poppies, not flat but reared up on its end. And
the poppies are all glistening and melting and soaking into the golden hay.
Some of the petals fall by his feet and he picks them up. They are warm and wet
and discolour his fingers.

Chapter Thirty Five

McCall lay in a field of new corn amid the scatter of offal
from the dead deer. Every part of his body hurt and he could not move to crawl
back inside the shelter of the car. His dim reflection in the silver hubcap
slowly became whiter like the figure in his head he never understood. He
thought of soldiers dying in no man’s land, calling out for the comfort of
their mothers. McCall wanted to cry out for his but the strength was draining
from him and the wind would have buried his words in snow if he had.

*

The moon-driven tides breaking on the rocks where Herod’s
palace once stood in Caesarea perpetually shift the sands which covered
evidence of conquest, torture and death since Phoenician times. Man’s power
ebbs and flows like the constant sea. All his efforts amount to nought in time.

Arie Minsky would walk the beach each day, treading by the
drowned remains of the once great city from where Rome ruled Palestine. He
might pick up tiny, green-gold coins last used when Jews were being torn apart
by tigers to amuse the amphitheatre mob. More often, it would be perfectly cut
tesserae from a mosaic – red, ivory, orange, half an inch square and all worn
smooth.

Minsky could imagine the feet of Herod himself walking on
these very fragments when they had been the tiniest parts of some grand and
beautiful design, now lost to sight forever.

He kept his finds in a shallow olive wood dish on his desk.
It was Minsky’s unconscious habit to make patterns with them if ever something
demanded his unhindered reflection. He was making patterns now, staring through
the open window to his garden of bitter aloe trees, troubled by how best to
deal with the problem of McCall. There was a time when Arie Minsky would not
have left such a matter to chance.

*

McCall first dropped acid after a Yardbirds gig in Cambridge
in ’65 with a pal who stole Jeff Beck’s bottle neck from his guitar case but
was dead within a year, convinced he could fly from his roof. Similar wild
imaginings came to McCall in the moments after his crash.

He saw iridescent birds and rainbows of flowers but as he
reached out to touch, there was nothing – no colour but white, no movement but
wind. And all that in a bone-cracking cold where sleep beckoned forever. So the
falling snow became the sheets of his bed and he slowly drifted away.

*

‘McCall? McCall? You’ll be OK. Do you hear?’

The faintest of sounds found him, like the sonar of a
submarine lost deep under the ice. Beep... beep... beep. Wires. Tubes.
Equipment. And above him, a face he did not know and a hand he had never held.
Or thought he hadn’t, anyway.

‘You’ve had an accident. You’re in hospital but you’re going
to be all right.’

Rosa. The dancing man’s daughter. Rosa. The woman in the
night who cried to be loved. But where was Bea? Where was Francis? Where were
the others who meant so much to him?

Far, far away – as they always had been. McCall’s eyes
closed again.

Beep... beep... beep.

*

Evie sat in the secure communications room of the British
Embassy’s modernist box of a building on the sea front in Tel Aviv, waiting for
a spook colleague in London to get back in touch. She had already rung McCall’s
office at the BBC from Arie Minsky’s house in Akko. They said he was still off
work sick. No one had heard from him – not even a postcard to Mrs Craven at
Garth or to her mother. The only other person Evie guessed McCall might contact
was Gerry Gavronski, his lefty magazine chum.

Gavronski was a backstairs advisor to the miners’ national
strike committee so his phone had an ear on it. It had been Evie’s job to read
transcripts of Gavronski’s private conversations during the strike... all of
them, even those with the journo lover her parish officer knew nothing about.
That was the way of it in Evie’s world. Fathers were not the only ones to be
betrayed.

The embassy cipher clerk handed her the decoded reply from
London.

Target rang G three days ago. Wanted to locate one
Arie Minsky. G duly obliged and called him back to a number in Elm Creek,
Canada listed to a ‘Rosa Virbalis.’ G said A.M. in Israel. Target said he would
book flight soonest.

Target mentioned being in a traffic accident. No
further details.

Over supper that night, Evie only told Bea and Minsky that
McCall intended to travel to Israel. Minsky did not ask how she found this out.
For her part, Evie showed no surprise that he seemed to know this information
already.

*

McCall lay on Rosa’s living room couch, face and body still
badly bruised, one eye half closed, head stitched up, ribs cracked. Only McCall
thought he was fit to leave hospital. There was no question of telling her – or
the police – what had really happened. Either some homicidal local yahoo had
sported with McCall or someone was giving him the gypsy’s warning. He knew
which was the more likely.

How odd he should owe his life to a Nazi’s daughter, passing
his wreckage on her way to work. How odd he should research her father’s death
only to find the truth about his own... and his mother’s, too. The forked roads
he travelled since emerging mute and stinking and half out of his head from all
he had seen those years before, were gradually coming together.

His anger at Bea and Francis began to abate. They had lied –
but only to save him from what was locked in his head. Yet that alone did not
get them out of the dock.

Three men – however evil – had died in strange and
mysterious circumstances. The fingerprints of Bea, Francis and Arie Minsky were
all over the crime scenes. If someone felt threatened by this being exposed and
was trying to frighten him off, then any hack worth a by-line knew this was
reason enough to keep buggering on.

He heard Rosa’s car then the porch door being
unlocked. She came in and saw his obvious discomfort as he carried an armful of
logs to the stove.

‘You just lay back, McCall. I’ll see to it and get us some
dinner.’

Part of him felt indebted to Rosa and wanted to tell her
everything – about himself, what happened to his parents, about Bea and Francis
and their conspiracy with Minsky. But he could hear Francis’s warning.
Information
shared is an advantage lost
. He should leave nothing behind in Canada which
might come back and bite him. Rosa herself never pressed McCall over who the
people in his photographs were or exactly what they had done.

But the night before he left, she seemed to want him to
understand how she become reconciled to her father’s death.

‘I guess there was a kind of terrible rough justice in what
happened... him being found and made to pay for what he’d done.’

‘Yes, but he should’ve had a trial under the law. Without
that, it’s mob rule.’

‘They never got one... those women and children back then.’

‘That’s just it, Rosa. What he did then was wicked but so
was what happened to him.’

‘Is it worth all this pain, McCall... raking everything up
again to go on TV and say two wrongs don’t make a right? How worthwhile is
that?’

If Rosa feared what she might suffer after any publicity
about how and why her father died, McCall understood more than she could ever
realise.

*

McCall cleared Customs at Ben Gurion Airport, changed
dollars into shekels then boarded a bus to that most lucent and holy of cities,
Jerusalem. He was immediately enveloped in the foreignness of everything around
him.

Israeli soldiers going home on leave sat with their rifles
alongside white-turbaned Bedouin in ankle-length jillabas and excited pilgrims,
about to walk Christ’s journey to his crucifixion. Through the open windows
came the smell of goats and sheep and pine trees blowing from the warm
bouldered hills where shot-up army vehicles still rusted with honour from
yesterday’s wars.

He slept fitfully on the long flight from Canada, sustained
by pain-killers and Scotch. He ached in body and mind and needed to recover
before ever confronting Arie Minsky.

A guest house close to the Jaffa Gate had a third floor room
with a bath and a view over the Old City’s Armenian Quarter. McCall unpacked
and looked down on cowled monks keeping to the shadows of its thick limestone
walls. The soft tapping of silversmiths making jewellery came from within
houses built before the Crusades.

McCall soaked himself for an hour then put on the jeans and
white T-shirt Rosa had washed and walked down through the lobby.

‘Excuse, Sir. Mr McCall, Sir?’

He turned to see the smiling Arab receptionist following him
outside into the late afternoon sun.

‘I have message for you.’

‘For me? You can’t have.’

‘On telephone, Sir. A man says for Mr McCall to go to the
American Colony Hotel.’

‘But no one knows I’m here. Who was this man?’

‘He does not say. He just say Mrs Wrenn will be there at six
tonight.’

Bea... in Jerusalem? How the hell did she know he was there?
McCall was caught off guard. Would Minsky be with her? Why had she quit her
cruise? And where was Evie? He looked around. It was easy to feel paranoid
here... so many spies and factions, all hating each other.

He disappeared into the sandal-smoothed warrens of the
ancient covered market. Traders called from every side – jewellers, artists,
potters, trinket merchants, all jostling for his money. He kept moving,
breathing in the ever-changing aroma – oranges and limes, sandalwood, baking
bread, hookahs being smoked by round-bellied men. As he emerged into daylight
by the Damascus Gate, he had decided to meet Bea. He was too intrigued not to.

The American Colony was no distance. Its walled inner
courtyard was cool, shaded with palms and perfumed by roses. Here sat
diplomats, military men and political advisors from every camp, head to head in
deniable discussions on this disputed seam between east and west Jerusalem. But
of Bea, there was no sign. He checked reception and the restaurant without
success.

McCall left after an hour, mightily puzzled. There was a
short cut to his hotel, through a quiet road between apartment blocks with
high-fenced gardens full of trees and bushes. He noticed two youngish men
sitting on a stone wall in denim jeans and with red and white shemaghs around
their faces. McCall was too preoccupied by thoughts of Bea to notice much else
and passed without eye contact. But three paces further on and they stole up on
him.

At that same moment, a small delivery van also started its
choreographed approach from behind. McCall half glanced to his left. There was
only time to see the van’s sliding door being opened.

Then his arms were grabbed and forced up his back as he was bundled
face down into the van. Someone rammed the door shut. Someone else sat on him.
Duct tape was wound round his mouth, eyes and hands. His Canadian injuries went
agonisingly live again.

The driver was already accelerating away, but gently – no
screeching tyres, no dangerous manoeuvres for a witness to recall from the ten
seconds it had taken for a man to disappear into the night.

And into McCall’s disorientating pain and alarm came a
memory out of nowhere... that Arie Minsky’s pals kidnapped Eichmann exactly
like this. But then a needle went into McCall’s leg and nothing registered
anymore.