He crouched over Samuel, who had wriggled across my body. At first he didn’t speak but started to search through what pockets he could reach in Samuel’s trousers, Samuel’s coat. I crawled, writhed, was no longer under Samuel and turned on his attackers. I tried to stop him. Samuel screamed at the pain made by my movements and by the father’s. The man shouted at me that all Jews had money, all Jews had jewellery. I struggled with him. He slashed at me with his axe but I was moving and it didn’t hit me. The blade hit the top of Samuel’s head. He came again: where was the money, the jewellery? I fought him. He had kicked Samuel with old boots, and that was his anger at his failure to find money and jewellery. I scraped my nails across his cheeks, hard enough to draw blood. He swung a fist at me, I caught and bit it, felt the bones of his fingers — and he backed away. He yelled now at me that I was worth a two-kilo bag of sugar at least. His voice had risen and his hand was bloodied. More blood was in his beard, and he told me he would bring Germans and the reward for identifying Jews in the forest would be paid him in sugar. He had the same hatred for me as the men of the Armia Karjowa had shown. He circled me. I faced him. I stood over Samuel and defended his body. I heard Samuel’s labouring breathing and knew his death was close. The forester did not dare to come closer to me. He said he would bring the Germans and spat at me.
He went with the child. He hurried. He went to earn his two-kilo bag of sugar.
Death had come.
His last moments, those last struggles of his life, were frantic and brave, and he had attempted to stand that he might protect me. There was no dignity in his death … but neither was there dignity for those going to the chambers at the end of the Road to Heaven, or for those on the wire and in the minefield. There was no mercy there, in the camp or in the forest. Only betrayal.
I took Samuel’s weight, had my hands in his armpits. I dragged him as far as I could. I cannot say where I found that strength.
I buried him.
With my fingernails, my hands and a length of dead wood, I made a pit for him. I worked him into it. I was exhausted to the point of collapse. I had to use my boots to push him in. I filled it, handful by handful, with earth and then I kicked leaves over it.
I was alone. I went on into the forest. I no longer knew the direction I took or what I hoped to find. So many had betrayed me, and at the end a child with an innocent face had joined the others. I vowed then never to love, never to trust, never to care about the deaths of others. I walked until the darkness closed on me, and kept walking, hit trees, fell into ditches — but felt no pain, only hatred.
‘Do you understand, Johnny?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The story makes me the man I am.’
‘I understand, sir.’
He thought the hatred, as expressed in the great mass of the forest behind him by a young woman, still lived with the same snake’s venom as in the days its culture had been bred. Carrick thought of the hatred as something that could not be turned away from. Reuven Weissberg’s world was his world.
‘You will stand with me, Johnny?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The punch hit his shoulder, rocked him. Johnny Carrick, too, was a part of the madness at the Sobibor camp. He seemed to see the young woman blundering among the trees in the darkness that hugged him, and he wondered if by then, in those minutes and hours, the lustre of her hair had changed to white.
The director general, Francis Pettigrew — without a knighthood yet, but it would come — tapped into the console and the lock clicked open. He went into Operations (Current) Control. The room was in the heart of the building, on a second floor down in the basement. He had not had the sword tap his shoulder, but possessed the necessary stature. He glided into the room, made a presence. He saw Banham hunched at a desk with a wall of screens in front of him, telephones, a flask, a half-eaten sandwich and … Of course, if the director general had believed without equivocation in the judgement of Christopher Lawson, it would not have been only Giles Banham here: the full team would have been out — Lambert, Amin and Carthew would have been competing for desk space.
The room was where operations of sensitivity were monitored in the hours up to the predicted climax of crisis, the time when it screwed up or the corks popped.
‘Heard from them over there, have you?’
‘No, Director, nothing. Left a couple of texts for Lawson — had an FO response to each. At least to the point. I suppose he’s getting a bit frantic. Don’t mind me saying it, Director, but isn’t this all a tad Ice Age?’
‘It’s the way it is, where we are, what we have.’ The director general had known Banham since he was knee high, and his parents three decades. There were not many from whom he would have permitted that slight curled lip when Christopher Lawson was discussed. Not that he could pass blame to Banham. It was he, Francis Pettigrew, who had nominated minimal manning for the room. ‘If something materializes across that bloody river, give me a shout.’
‘You’ll be, Director …?’
‘At the club.’
‘I’ll call you.’
He realized then what he had done. Banham, who would remain alone in the room and had already started to consume the remainder of his sandwich, was justified in his visible lack of excitement in a mission called Haystack. Had he merely humoured Christopher Lawson or had he sold him short? Pettigrew didn’t know.
He slipped out. On that night of the week they did a rather good casserole at the club. Perhaps he had allowed his one-time mentor to bully him — shouldn’t have done. He walked off down the corridor that led to the lift. Should have asked for greater provenance before signing off on Haystack and committing those resources … Well, he’d be charitable and decent when Lawson came on the phone: ‘No show, Francis, may have been overegged. Worth a try …’
‘Absolutely, Christopher, well worth a try.’
He didn’t have a picture in his mind of where Lawson and his increments were and what it would be like for them.
He took a lift up. His protection intercepted him, the reception people stood. Security opened the swing doors so that he did not have to swipe his way out. It was the departure of the king-emperor of VBX. His car waited.
And much else lay on his mind. The door was opened. Damn it, more was on his mind than the comfort of Christopher Lawson, who had taken squatter’s rights on the banks of the Bug river.
They slipped away.
Adrian, Dennis and Deadeye headed for the river as they had been told to. Adrian had only a vague sense of history, and thought Deadeye got none of the romance and tragedy of it, but Dennis had a keen interest in the past and with it a love of all things French. Not merely the cooking and wine production, but France’s military history. Dennis thought of their dispatch back to the river as the nearest thing to the final throw, the sending forward of the Imperial Guard — 18 June 1815 — on the field of Waterloo. If they — himself, Adrian and Deadeye — did not turn the day and locate their targets on the river-bank, it was lost. They were the last chance. It was reassuring, in a gallows sort of way, that Deadeye had retrieved a weapon from his baggage, loaded it and was carrying it.
They had left the guv’nor, the boss, with Shrinks, pacing, deep in his thoughts and murmuring to himself. If Lawson had felt a mounting panic, he had not shown it … Impressive, that. They went off and away, through the trees and towards the Bug, moving carefully because that was their skill, but he seemed to hear the tramp of those marching feet and the squelching mud of the Imperial Guard’s advance. The last throw.