Twenty minutes, crushed in the chambers, to die. Two hours from the shunting of a train to the opening of wide doors and the escape of the poison.
Once, naked women fought the Germans and Ukrainians in the Tube and were machine-gunned. Those who lived were driven at bayonet point into the chambers.
Once, an old Jew threw sand from the Tube into the face of a German and told him that his Reich would vanish as dust and smoke. He was shot dead.
Most went to their deaths in ignorance or terror. Few had the opportunity or the strength of will to fight … We did. We who lived and serviced the camp and knew its purpose, and knew our own fate when our usefulness was exhausted, demanded to live — and did not know how to achieve it. If we had not wanted to survive, clung to life, worked in the camp, Sobibor could not have existed. We, the living, enabled it to function.
I knew. I had lost the protection of innocence and ignorance. I wanted to live.
The darkness was over the forest. Tadeuz Komiski sat by a grave. The place where he had dug it, beside which trees, the distance from his home, was his secret.
The summer of 2004, four years ago, had been spoken of on the radio as the worst in a half-century. Torrential rain had caused the Bug to break its banks, fields to flood, tracks to be blocked and the roots of trees to be washed away. A grave had been opened and a skeleton exposed. The layers of needles, composted leaves and shallow sand had shifted under the incessant rain.
He remembered the young man and the woman. The bones still wore the uniform of the camp. He had moved the remains. The uniform had disintegrated and the bones had come apart, but he had tried to do it with dignity. He had dug a new grave, deeper than she could have, with his long-handled spade. His life was cursed by this man, but he had buried him again and had mumbled a prayer before filling in the earth.
If it had not been for his fear of watchers in the forest, as there had been the day before, he would have put posies of wild flowers on this spot. He could not. They would be seen. A crime would be uncovered.
He knew of no one else who lived under such a curse, with such guilt.
Alone, Tadeuz Komiski watched the grave.
He picked blackberries. Little Jonathan. Ignored by his grandparents and left to roam while his mother was at work in the food factory. Below him, in mid-stream and on a spur of submerged rocks, an angler wielded a great salmon rod and cast a many-coloured fly, with big hackles, towards the top of a wide pool. He picked the fruit and dropped the berries into a plastic bowl.
He was not asleep, but dozed. Sometimes he was the child who heard the thin cry of the osprey over the Spey near its mouth. Sometimes he was the man and there was the clatter of ducks on the river outside the narrowboat’s hull. He was too tired to sleep.
Only in a few early autumns had there been enough sunshine to bring on the blackberries in the last days before term started. He might have been eight or nine, but he remembered everything of that afternoon, and he had searched the banks for the bramble clumps among the gorse on the banks.
The narrowboat was the Summer Queen and she was moored at another bank, of another river, was held by two ropes and two iron pins hammered into the grass. He had been there three hours, and Katie had been waiting for him. She had cooked for him but he had only toyed with the food and he knew she had expected to get into bed with him, but he had pleaded exhaustion so she’d left him. Still dressed, his shoes kicked off, he had stretched out on the bed. In his mind was his weakness that evening. He had left the house, had walked away down the street with the family’s bouquet in his arms, had turned the corner — only reached it by extreme willpower — and had known he was out of their sight, and had damn near collapsed against an iron railing. He had realized how weakened he was. He had leaned on the railings and shivered.
The child, Jonathan, picked and filled the bowl. The little cry of excitement from the river, an arching rod, then the silver flash in the water as the fish was brought to the net. He had seen that, and its clean execution with a hammer blow to the head. A tear had welled at the killing of the fish but he had wiped it away. The fish’s death was not important. It was not why he recalled that afternoon above the Spey.
If he had not recaptured a moment of his youth, Carrick would have been overwhelmed by the suddenness of the gunfire in the street and by the long stress of living the lie. He would have seen again the family’s gratitude, the perfect brilliance of the flowers given him. It had taken a toll of him, he recognized. By now he should have written up the Book: it was obligatory for an undercover level one to take the first secure opportunity to write up the Book in which all matters of potential evidence and interest were listed. The Book was too sensitive an item for him to keep. Katie had brought it. He should have written up the events of the last several days — the routine, the confusion over the arrest of Simon Rawlings and his own promotion on the household’s ladder, the chaos of gunfire in a City street, major material, and the promise of Josef Goldmann that Johnny would, in future, be at his side. It should all have been in the Book, but it was not.
Why did a grown man remember seeing a salmon killed, and picking a full bowl of blackberries? He had gone home to the bungalow, let himself in quietly, had put the brimming bowl beside the sink, had not told his grandparents of what he had done — or of the killing of something as beautiful as the salmon — and had gone to his room. He had waited there for praise and thanks. He had heard his mother return from the factory, had heard her in the kitchen, then her trill of pleasure, and she had gone to the sitting room to thank her parents for picking the blackberries — had never thought it might have been him. They had accepted her thanks, had not disclaimed them. A pretty small matter in the life of a child, the denial of gratitude for picking a bowl of blackberries, but it had cut him off from the adults who had reared him — a never-forgotten memory, never erased. He had thought then, as a child, he could live alone and without company.
And he was alone. Katie had abandoned him. She was in the sitting area, waiting for them to come. He was alone and suffering: she knew it, no one else in the team did. Quite deliberately, Carrick hit his forehead against the varnished planks beside the pillow, as if that would clear bloody melancholy. He pushed himself up, shook his head hard, as if that would expel demons. The Summer Queen was owned by Katie’s parents, and through the months of August and September they would take extended leave from work and navigate at snail’s pace through the networks of canals in the South and West Midlands. For the rest of the year it was available to Katie and she used it as a safe-house where an officer, in deep cover, could come to be debriefed, write up his Book and crash out from his stress. Every month, for a weekend, her parents would come to the Summer Queen, get the old Ford Escort engine coughing and alive, then move her to another branch of a canal or to the Thames. It was good, and secure, and no pattern of its movements existed.
Most times when they came to the narrowboat, they had sex on the bed — not wonderful but good and adequate — and they’d roll away, feeling the better for it. Not that evening. When he’d turned her down, with her blouse nearly unbuttoned, her shoes off and the zip on her skirt undone, he’d glimpsed her hurt, and had twisted to face the varnished wood and the porthole window. Most times, when George and Rob came, she had to scamper after their warning shout to get herself half decent for them. Always the Book was written up before they went down on to the bed. It was bad that he’d hurt her, but the gunfire was still in his head, and he lived with greater deception. All the guys in the SCD10 team had bad days when they screamed to be let free. Rob understood, and George, and they soothed the scratches. God … God … There was a whistle from the field.