Prime Target (25 page)

‘Tell him not to worry,' he said, ‘I haven't forgotten. ‘I'll get there on time, I always do.'

There was a sharp tap on the door. Horst, he thought, or the Edel woman had forgotten something.

He crossed the studio and opened the door. A stranger was there, tall, blue-eyed, with very fair hair. He had a confident smile.

‘Herr Jürgen? I came for the package.'

‘I'm sorry? The package? There must be a mistake.'

‘That's it.' The young man pointed to a cardboard box halfway across the room.

‘No, it isn't, I -'

The young man pushed past Jürgen and entered the studio. He stopped in front of the portrait of Marianne Edel, staring at it.

Jürgen came away from the door, frowning, confused.

‘That is rubbish,' the young man said, still smiling.

‘Get out of here,' Jürgen said. He took the young man by the arm. ‘Right this minute, or I call the police.'

The young man pulled his arm free and slipped the other hand into the pocket of his tweed jacket. He pulled out a black snub-nosed revolver.

‘Here is a fact, Uli Jürgen. In 1942 the painter Samuel Weiss was kicked out of his Berlin studio, two streets away from this spot, and his canvases and paints were thrown out of the windows on to the road. Weiss was then made to wear a placard listing his alleged crimes against humanity, and while he was paraded around the little park near his studio, the Nazis made a bonfire of all his paintings.'

The young man waved the gun at Jürgen, making him stand in front of the portrait of Marianne Edel.

‘Another fact. Samuel Weiss was estimated to be one of the foremost experimental painters of the thirties. His name was mentioned alongside those of Schwitters, Hodler and Kandinsky. He illuminated the world with his vision. You, on the other hand, call yourself a painter, an artist, and yet you have never displayed a talent for producing anything more elevated than sophisticated posters.'

‘What is your point?' Jürgen demanded. ‘What do you want with me?'

‘Weiss finally died after being blinded and having his hands and his spirit broken in Belsen. That was his fate, after having lived his entire life in poverty. You, an ungifted hack, have brought no light into the world, have never been poor, and are about to die rich. My point, sir, is that everyday life bulges with sickening ironies.'

Jürgen had turned white.

‘Suppose you at least try to die the death of a true artist,' the young man said.

‘I warn you,' Jürgen said, ‘you will find yourself in great trouble.'

‘Not me, sir. I am not about to suffer like so many people have suffered at the hands of you and yours, your sidekicks, the brotherhood with its benighted faith in the power of thickheaded bullies to prevail.'

Jürgen felt his bowels loosen. He swallowed against the dryness in his throat. He remembered the telephone call from Viktor Kretzer, warning him to be on his guard.

‘Here is your chance of redemption, Uli Jürgen.'

The young man extended his arm suddenly, pointing the gun at a downward angle. He fired. Jürgen stood where he was, half-deafened. His right arm was numb and felt incredibly heavy. He looked down and saw half his hand was gone. Blood trickled freely on to the floorboards.

‘You are an artist,' the young man said. ‘Try to think like one. This context is unbearable, yes? You paint with your right hand, it is the instrument of your expression. But it is gone. It cannot be used so your art is effectively silenced.'

‘You bastard,' Jürgen said weakly.

‘Enmeshed in such
catastrophe,
what does the true artist wish for at once, as a matter of reaction?'

Jürgen stared at the bright intelligent eyes, the fixed smile, trying to read salvation from this nightmare. Pain suddenly surged along his arm
and his stomach lurched. He doubled over and vomited.

‘So what does the true artist do? What can he want now, bereft of his
raison d'être?'
The young man snapped his fingers. ‘If he is a determined artist who would wish to express himself in spite of the most major of setbacks, he would say, to hell with this, I will teach myself to paint with my other hand.'

In an instant his arm was outstretched and the gun pointing downwards. He fired a second time, blowing off the thumb and first two fingers of Jürgen's left hand. Jürgen staggered back, reeled for a moment, then dropped to his knees in the puddle of his vomit.

‘Now we have the position of ultimate despair. Discount any deranged impulses to learn to paint with the feet or the mouth. You have lost the ability to express yourself. Can you feel that, the sense of loss, the black hole of despair?'

Jürgen tried to say something but managed only a grunt. Shock had put his body into tremor. Blood gathered in pools on the floor on either side of him.

‘You want to die. Am I right? You know life holds nothing for you any more. Tell me, Uli Jürgen, have I made you feel that?'

Jürgen looked at the end of the barrel, thinking how small it was, how insignificant for something so terrible.

‘Do you feel the way poor old Samuel Weiss
must have felt, after they had taken away his vision

and his means of expression?'

The young man pulled Jürgen to his feet and

stood him in front of the easel again. He raised

the gun.

‘In the end he must have
longed
for death.' The young man fired the gun into Jürgen's face.

Sabrina poured a large cognac and handed it to Erika as she came out of the bedroom. Erika drank it in two swallows. Sabrina poured another. This time Erika sipped.

‘He's asleep,' she said.

Gregor had gone to bed. The CS gas had made him sick. Erika had overcome his apparent desire to fight, and told him firmly that he needed rest. In the end he felt too ill to resist.

‘I didn't realize how attached I had become,' Erika said.

‘It can be a surprise.'

‘I thought, if he dies, I'm going to die too.' She looked at Sabrina.

‘I need you to keep your promise, Erika.'

‘Go to the kitchen, we can spread things out in there.'

Sabrina prepared coffee while Erika made a telephone call. By the time the coffee was ready, a motorcycle courier was at the door with a satchel.
Erika brought it to the kitchen and put the contents on the broad worktop. There was a thick book bound in black leather, a photograph album, and hand-written notes on hundreds of sheets of paper, stapled together in batches.

‘This material is kept at the home of a magistrate,' Erika said. ‘This is the first time it has been out of that place since it was gathered together.'

Sabrina touched the hard leather cover of the big book.

‘That is a catalogue of crimes committed by the
Jugend von Siegfried.
It's the accumulated records of more than two thousand acts of brutality, robbery, fraud, coercion and murder, committed over a thirty-five-year period.'

‘These are their own records?'

‘Copies, yes. Hard won, I promise you. It has cost time, money and labour, and at least one cooperative lawyer's clerk was killed for helping us.'

‘What are the pictures?'

‘The guilty men and mementoes of some of their victims. The collection means very little, unless your own heart is caught up in what they did, and what they still do.'

‘And the bundles of notes?'

‘Interview material, mostly the testimony of victims.'

‘It looks like a labour of love. Or hate.'

‘What astonishes me, even now,' Erika said, ‘is that the records exist. They are so damning. Nazis have this self-destructive compulsion to
record everything they do. They can't make a move without making a record of it. They have to leave their mark, like dogs at lamp-posts. During the war, they spent fortunes in time, money and manpower just keeping their records straight - the very records that hanged dozens of them.'

‘It looks like a well organized collection.'

‘It is brilliantly done. The method of accumulation and cataloguing was devised by Emily Selby's father, Johannes Lustig.'

‘Your father's cousin.'

‘Yes. To me he was Uncle Johannes. He also carried out the early research work. As time passed and we became more organized, the research was co-ordinated by myself and the other members of
Juli Zwanzig.
We only became a group with a name after Uncle Johannes died. It was his wish.'

‘I know.'

Erika sighed. ‘I suppose I should have guessed.'

‘Are you all activists? Or are you mainly fundraisers and co-ordinators?'

‘I am an activist against Nazis in general,' Erika said. ‘Journalism is my chosen means of attack. The others raise money, as you surmised. They fund lectures and publications to keep alive the truth of what happened to whole generations of Jews, and they do what they individually can to give our movement shape and spirit. But at the core,
Juli Zwanzig
has physical aims -'

‘To kill off the surviving members of the
Jugend von Siegfried.'

‘That is correct. Uncle Johannes insisted nothing less would do. We lacked the stomach, individually and collectively, for such a course of action, but that didn't mean it was wrong. We needed to find a person who could consummate our aims.'

‘You had no moral problem with that? Hiring a killer?'

‘No problem at all,' she said defiantly. ‘Just remember, we live with the knowledge that year in, year out, the
Jugend von Siegfried
systematically undermine, sabotage and actually kill Jews as a matter of policy. They do it subtly, without even communicating directly with each other. Unopposed, they would never stop. Somebody has to stop them, somebody has to punish their iniquity.'

‘They're not bomb-proof. You have evidence here that the police can use against them.'

‘Uncle Johannes did not want them handed over to the law. To extract the kind of justice he called for, we needed someone who hated the Nazis as much as we do, and who was capable of killing.'

‘So who does that? Who's the mysterious young man with fair hair and blue eyes?'

For a moment Erika looked as if she would not say. But the understanding between them was clear, and she had given her word. Sabrina watched
her head bow a fraction, the only sign that this was capitulation.

‘He is Einar Ahlin. A Norwegian.'

‘Why him?'

‘Two years ago he came to Germany vaguely intending to do harm to the new Nazis. We diverted his attention to the old Nazis instead.'

‘Norwegians have no fond memories of the Third Reich.'

‘This Norwegian especially. Einar has a troubled history. Very troubled. He is an epileptic with personality problems who just happened to be born into a family touched by tragedy. His grandparents were tortured to death by the occupying Germans in Oslo during the war. Their daughter's life, as a consequence, was shadowed until the day she died.'

‘Einar's mother.'

Erika nodded. ‘She committed suicide in 1989. For nearly fifty years she kept her hatred of the Nazis burning and the fire passed into Einar at an early age. Many people would regard his obsession with punishing Nazis as pathological.'

‘But you found it convenient.'

‘Read the facts any way you wish,' Erika said. ‘He believes in what he does. I believe in it too. I am happy to fund work which achieves an end we both passionately seek.'

‘These records could probably put the remaining Siegfried boys in jail for the rest of their lives,' Sabrina said.

‘You think that now I should hand them over to the police?'

‘It would be the civilized thing to do.'

‘That brings us back to retribution,' Erika said. ‘Is a desire for proper redress so uncivilized? Justice on the biblical scale is the only real kind. These bastards have spent their lives from childhood working against Jews. They have wreaked misery, calamity and death on people they did not know. They have to pay for that. The enlightened liberal answer, life imprisonment, does not meet the bill. They have to pay with their lives.'

Sabrina noticed that the passion was gone from Erika's voice. She was spouting the words, but now there was no force of conviction behind them.

‘Where is Einar Ahlin?'

‘I've no idea.' A spark of defiance still flared, demonstrating once more the passion of Erika's commitment to her cause.

‘Come on, Erika.'

‘I promised to co-operate, I didn't promise to deliver anyone's head on a plate. Besides, it's true, I don't know where he lives. When we meet it's on neutral ground. He works from an address list Emily put together, and picks his targets from the order they appear in the picture.'

‘What picture?'

Erika opened the album and pressed it flat at a ten-by-eight sepia-toned enlargement. It showed Adolf Hitler, standing on a rain-swept, bombed-out street, saluting a group of young boys.

‘The
Jugend von Siegfried,'
Erika said. ‘Photographed in 1945, on the very day they were inaugurated.'

Names had been entered in white ink next to everyone in the picture. The first boy on the left was Karl Sonnemann. The next one was Stefan Fliegel; beside him was Uli Jürgen.

‘Einar broke the pattern when the American showed up.'

‘Harold Gibson?'

‘Yes.'

‘How did he know about him?'

‘Emily sent me e-mail about the man and his organization, all gathered from notes she'd found - they were for a paper Uncle Johannes had been preparing at the time of his death, about Americans providing financial support to a Nazi organization in Berlin.'

‘And you showed the e-mail to Einar?'

Erika nodded. ‘He is like a ferret with anything like that. He took the information to himself, worked on his own research.'