The light stayed constant and the figures on the screen did not alter.
Bugsy would not have thought envy a sin, merely something that disturbed the equilibrium of colleagues thrown together on an operation. Mr Lawson, as was right for the guv’nor, was in the minibus, in a position to react at speed to information thrown up by the screen. The car was free. The two vehicles were off the main road now and had found a safe, out-of-sight parking place in a camping area about halfway between the river and where the bug beacon now was. Well, the car had been free … The girl had gone to it … The lanky lad, the guv’nor’s sidekick, had headed there too. Maybe one was in the front and the other was in the back. Maybe they were in the back together. He didn’t know, but he felt that little surge of envy at the thought of them — nice girl, and good at what she had to do. His wife said the only females he fancied were the ones in his lofts, those that could fly fast.
The figures on the screen did not change. Neither did the green light go to red.
Dawn came, and they gathered. With the first low rays of sunshine, they came back to the central point that equated with the longitude and latitude numbers given in the coded message.
The formation along the bank had seen Mikhail and Viktor take the two furthest reaches of the Bug river, and two hundred metres from each of them had been Reuven, their avoritet, and the Englishman they mistrusted. At the centre point, overlooking the river and the Belarus frontier marker, was Josef Goldmann … The instructions had been quite clear. The men from Sarov should only approach the far riverbank, in darkness, and should signal their arrival by torchlight. No flashes, no signal had been given.
For the last three hours, an eternity, they had been spread out over eight hundred metres of the Bug’s westhern bank. Had he been a Catholic or an Orthodox believer, Josef Goldmann would have said he had ‘lapsed’, or become ‘agnostic’. The Jewish faith for him had never existed, not as a child and not in adult life but — almost — he had prayed to see a light wink on the far side, or to hear a shrill whistle from Viktor or Mikhail. There had been no signal, and he was at the meeting point to which they returned, and hidden behind him, under dead branches, was the boat, ridiculously small, that Reuven and Johnny had brought, and with it the length of coiled rope. What had been not a prayer but a fervent wish and a hope had not been answered. Josef Goldmann could not remember when, if ever, he had been so cold, so miserable and so near to despair. The hours had slipped away, darkness and moonlight had become a grey smear, then the lowest beams from the sun had pierced the trees on the far side. Dearly, he wanted to take his mobile from his pocket, dial the numbers and hear Esther’s voice, but he dared not disobey the order given him.
They came coughing and spitting, stretching and grunting, cursing the new day, all except Johnny. The Englishman, his own man and saviour, was quiet, withdrawn. Josef Goldmann noticed that Johnny’s jacket was unfastened and his shirt unbuttoned, and thought it extraordinary on a night when rain had laced down on them between the isolated moments when it had stopped and the moon had been visible and had lit the river.
He sensed the exhaustion in Reuven and Johnny. Before they had taken their spread positions, Reuven had spoken briefly of bringing the small boat from a lake by the village of Okuninka, carrying it through an expanse of forest so that its keel did not scrape a track, dragging it on the road and hiding at the side if cars came, manhandling it through the forest and past the old campsite where the killings had been done, and bringing it to the Bug bank. He had thought it incredible, a feat of strength … but the boat was so small and the river so wide, its flow so awesome.
Josef Goldmann, teeth chattering, said to any who might listen to him, ‘Perhaps they will not come.’
Viktor, surly, answered, ‘They will come. I arranged the detail. They will come.’
‘Perhaps they can’t come — an accident, a delay. A change of heart and—’
Viktor said, ‘If they don’t come, I’ll go to them and break every bone in their bodies. They’ll come.’
‘A change of heart and the realization of what they’re doing. Why do those men want a “million American dollars”?’ He realized he was babbling and that his words, Russian and English, were jumbled. ‘How can they spend a million American dollars? I don’t think they’ll come.’
He had seen, as he had spoken of money — the scale of it — in English, that Johnny Carrick’s eyebrows rose a fraction, and then he had looked away fast. Maybe, too, Viktor had seen it. Of course, Johnny Carrick didn’t know what would come across the river, if they reached it, didn’t know what was worth one million American dollars.
Reuven said, detached, ‘It’s very simple. We watch again this evening.’
‘So, we wait. What shall we do for twelve hours till the evening? What?’
He thought then that Viktor eyed him with contempt, that Mikhail sneered, and Reuven didn’t bother to answer him, and he thought that this purchase and sale had broken them, split apart the bonds of their group. It would never be the same again. Together they had climbed so high and so fast in Perm and Moscow, and Reuven had climbed higher in Berlin, while Goldmann had soared in the City of London.
He heard Reuven say to Johnny Carrick, ‘Come with me, walk with me.’
‘Yes, sir.’
They were gone, lost among the trees.
Now Josef Goldmann scoured the far bank of the Bug until the sun’s intensity burned his eyes, and knew they should never have travelled to this place, but could not say why he felt a gathering fear for what they did and its consequences.
The journey that was Reuven Weissberg’s life was a thread of cotton unrolled from a spool.
Carrick stood at the edge of the trees, with the forest behind him, and listened. He heard a story told without emotion.
The cotton’s thread had been anchored here, and it had made a great loop but had come back and now the spool was empty. In front of him was an old rail head. From the junction one track continued into the forest he had walked through, trailing after Reuven Weissberg, but near to him now was a spur in the track, a siding that came to an end in the winter-yellowed grass and beyond the last sleeper was a buffer, a crude steel frame to which a heavy plank was fastened. He believed that everything governing the life of Reuven Weissberg had started and would end here.
He was told of the camp, two kilometres from the village of Sobibor, that had been built on this site. A place for the living and a terminal for the walking dead had been built here under the terms of Operation Reinhard on virgin ground and beyond the sight of witnesses. When completed it was a killing ground. It had no role for forced labour, only for extermination. Those to be murdered were Jews.
He saw two wooden homes, one brightly painted in soft green, and learned that they had been called the Swallow’s Nest and the Merry Flea by the German officers of the SS units at the Sobibor camp: they were now the homes of men working in the forestry industry. He saw a raised platform beyond the spur track’s buffer. Great piles of stacked pit props lay on it, and open freight wagons were already loaded high. Jews had been brought to that platform from Holland, France, the Polish ghettoes, German cities, towns in Belarus and Ukraine and invited to step down from their transports. On that platform, where sunshine now fell, the Jews had descended and started the walk to their deaths.