A Place Of Strangers (22 page)

Chapter Thirty Six

The road from Jerusalem to the lowest point on earth cuts
through the dimpled brown hills where legend has Moses buried, passes by
Bedouin camps all tethered with goats then heads down, down, down to the soupy,
turquoise waters of the Dead Sea.

The mountains of Jordan border the eastern shore,
pinkish-purple in the salinated haze and to the west, rise the sheer cliffs of the
Judean desert, a thousand feet above. They say the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah
are submerged thereabouts, destroyed by a rain of burning sulphur when God
judged their peoples immoral. Only stones and rocks remain, populated by
darting lizards and tiny orange flowers, baking in the
hamsin
winds
rolling in from the desert’s dry riverbeds like draughts from an oven.

It was near this place McCall was taken.

‘Why are you in Israel?’

‘I’m here to see some people.’

‘What people will you see?’

‘Why do you need to know?’

‘Why won’t you answer?’

‘Because it’s none of your damned business and I don’t know
who you are.’

McCall’s cussedness was not without risk but owed much to a
broken body and the mother of all hangovers from whatever drug had knocked him
out. His captors would not untape his eyes and hands, either – so he pissed
himself like a child.

‘What is your interest in Mr Minsky?’

‘Hasn’t he told you himself?’

His interrogator sounded young but was neither Arab nor
Israeli. He spoke accented English though McCall couldn’t work out from where.

‘Why are you pursuing him?’

‘Let me go and I’ll tell you.’

McCall’s hands and legs were tied to the wooden chair where
he sat. The floor was cement hard. His voice echoed slightly, as if off a wall.
He had to be in a building.

‘I have some advice for you, Mr McCall. Leave Israel. Forget
all about Mr Minsky.’

‘And why should I do that?’

McCall was answered with two punches to the face – quick and
hard so his nose bled and his eyes watered and snot ran into his mouth.

‘Don’t try and be smart. Just do yourself a favour – leave
well alone and fuck off while you still can.’

Everything went quiet then a car started up and drove away.
McCall was alone. Flies began settling on his bloody face. He could not bend
low enough to shield himself from them or bear to worsen his migraine by
shaking his head. It was another torture. He strained violently against the
tapes around his wrists till they bled, too. His screams turned to sobs, his
anger to self-pity.

Maybe an hour passed before he heard a vehicle labouring
across rough ground towards him. He was terrified that his kidnappers were
coming back. But he started shouting anyway. Then two car doors slammed shut...
footsteps came closer – and the tap, tap, tap of a walking stick.

‘Who is it? Who are you?’

No one answered. McCall felt his hands and legs being cut
free then a tearing pain as his blindfold was pulled off. The light was sudden
and piercingly bright. It took a full minute before McCall could see his
rescuers. Two men stood before him. One he had never seen before. The other was
Arie Minsky.

*

Bea waited on the veranda of a cabin at kibbutz Ein Gedi, a
few miles further south but still overlooking the Dead Sea. They grew peppers
and avocados there, made the desert bloom with exotic flowers.

It was Bea’s vision of paradise yet she dreaded the coming
hour. The kibbutz paramedic drove up in his little open truck. Arie was
crouched in the back where McCall was stretched out on a bundle of sacks.

The two men laid him down indoors like a corpse from a cross
for Bea to undress then bathe his hurts as only a mother could. She might have
wept at how he looked – eyes swollen, face bruised yellow and caked with blood,
body bent with hunger and all the injuries of his car crash aflame again. They
gave him water and tablets to make him sleep. Bea stayed with him all day and
all night. She never left his side.

Minsky returned to Akko. McCall was best left alone with Bea
for the present. He rested for much of each day.

Bea brought his meals to where he sat in the garden –
yoghurt, fruit, cold meats, cheese – and smiled her crooked smiles as his
strength slowly returned.

She said Evie was back in London but knew she would want to
send love. McCall did not respond. Bea’s speech was becoming less jumbled but
McCall didn’t really want to talk, not then – not until several days later.

They were sitting beneath uncountable millions of stars,
each a reminder of the smallness of human existence, of how little we know,
still less understand.

‘Why didn’t you tell me the truth about my parents, Bea?’

‘Couldn’t... so hard.’

‘But I’ve remembered, you see.’

‘Wanted to... Mac, believe please.’

‘Then why didn’t you?’

‘Moment passed... older you were, truth more pain for you.’

‘So it was better I lived a lie?’

‘Did our best, Mac... believe, please.’

He did... up to a point. Yet part of him would always feel
tricked, as if something beyond value been taken from him. He had it back now –
but only by accident and at a price. Bea still had many questions to answer.

‘Who kidnapped me? Who kidnapped me and why did they do it?’

‘Not know, Mac.’

‘Tell me the truth this time. It was Arie, wasn’t it?’

‘Cannot say. Please, cannot.’

‘I know about Arie and those Nazis who died.’

‘No, no, no – ’

‘And all about you... cheating on Francis.’

‘– no, no, no.’

 
Bea stood up with
both hands to her ears like a child not wanting to listen anymore. Then she
locked herself in her bedroom. It is what Helen would have done if he had ever
been given chance to confront her, too.

*

Arie Minsky returned to Ein Gedi next morning. On one level,
McCall owed Minsky for freeing him. But how could he have known where McCall
would be if he hadn’t put him there in the first place? Minsky survived behind
Nazi lines, took years to hunt down his enemies and get away with murder. He
had motives aplenty to throw a scare into McCall. But for now, they were locked
in an uneasy stand off.

‘Feeling any better, Mac?’

‘A bit, yes. Thank you.’

‘I remember you in short pants... skinny little kid, always
playing cowboys and Indians in Garth Woods.’

Minsky smiled fondly to himself.

‘And now you’re the sheriff, after me for murder.’

McCall’s stomach tightened. He was not ready for this,
physically or any other way. Minsky looked a good two decades younger than his
eighty odd years, lean and toned and tempered in fires which those who had
experienced them would never forget.

‘We have much to discuss, Mac.’

Minsky walked with him to a table beyond the kibbutz’s
dining hall where the aerial roots of a Banyan tree formed a stockade against
the fierce sun. Black and white wheatears dipped and drank in water spilling
from a fountain of Egyptian porphyry. Here was peace. Minsky brought them
omelettes, orange juice, baklava. He was a fastidious eater. No crumb was
allowed to settle on his white shirt, no flake of pastry on his chin.

‘Whatever you think of me, Mac, you must go easy on Bea.’

‘In what way must I?’

‘You must never forget that most bereaved kids are good at
convincing adults they’re fine because that’s what they think the adults want
to hear.’

‘You mean it makes it easier for them?’

‘In a way, yes. But for Bea and Francis, where was the
wisdom in making you retrieve something so terrible that your subconscious had
already buried it?’

The sound of the water fountain reminded McCall of the
stream in Garth Woods, of Francis so burdened and betrayed, of innocence lost.

‘How could such a thing happen... my mother and father to
die like that?’

Arie Minsky hesitated, but only for a moment.

‘The newspapers said it was murder and then suicide.’

‘Half wrong – as usual.’

‘Well, only one person could ever say for sure what happened
that day... ’

‘Yeah... I know that now. It was an accident. My father
didn’t mean to kill her. He wasn’t a murderer... he didn’t have to kill
himself.’

Minsky nodded in agreement. But for McCall, this was not the
only painful truth demanding to be confronted. Minsky told him about Edward
McCall cracking up on a bombing raid with Francis and then being unjustly
convicted of cowardice.

‘He’d been a hero till then, Mac... a hero to be broken on
the wheel of war and humiliated as a warning to others. His life fell apart
after that... he couldn’t take it.’

Debts mounted, despite help from Francis. Edward and
Elizabeth left Somerset and took their son to Devon. That is where the tragedy
happened. Francis’s fake newspaper article was an attempt to redraw and soften
his stepson’s history, to lay a false trail should McCall ever set out in
search of his parents.

‘Never, ever forget, Mac – Bea and Francis acted in good
faith, in your best interest as they saw it.’

McCall listened to this new evidence as a juror might hear
the family context of an appalling crime. Yet he knew nothing anyone could say
anymore would fill the emptiness he still felt inside... the void where his mother
and father should have been.

Chapter Thirty Seven

‘Come on, Mac, let’s take a trip into the desert... you and
me.’

‘Without your goons this time?’

‘I haven’t got any
goons
.’

‘So who kidnapped me and how did you know where’d I’d be?’

‘Israel’s a small country. Not much happens here without
certain people finding out.’

‘Then you’ll know who my kidnappers were?’

‘The question isn’t simply who, Mac... it’s why that’s more
interesting.’

They drove to Masada, a mountain fortress towering above the
Dead Sea. Soldiers of Rome’s Tenth Legion laid siege to a band of Jewish
fighters at Masada soon after the time of Christ. Faced with slavery or death,
the rebels chose to put themselves to their own swords and Masada came to
symbolise sacrifice and resistance against an oppressor.

A steep path zig-zagged up through falls of scree and rock
to the incandescent summit, fourteen hundred feet above. McCall should never
have set out on such an arduous climb. He was too weak, the heat too fierce.
McCall was all in – and was about to be tested further in such a place as the
devil challenged Jesus to turn stone into bread..

‘So, Mac – let’s hear it, tell me about the evidence you’ve
got against me.’

McCall felt cornered... put up or shut up. There was no
choice but to spell out what he had discovered of the suspicious deaths of the
three Nazis in Bea’s photograph – Rösler, Frank and Virbalis – and the
conspiracy he alleged she, Francis and Minsky were in.

‘Is that it, Mac? Is that all you’ve got?’

‘So it’s not true? It’s all a coincidence?’

‘Whether it is or it isn’t, you must know you’ll never fly
that by a libel lawyer.’

A group of off duty Israeli soldiers passed by with a guide,
about to learn that survival never came without a butcher’s bill.

‘All right, I’ve heard you out now do you want to hear my
side?’

‘Sure, Arie. I’d hate to think someone wanted me dead for no
reason.’

Minsky’s eyes hardened against him.

‘You need to listen and learn, my friend. Rösler died in a
freak road accident. That’s not me saying it – the German police say it.

“They also say that Wilhelm Frank got lost in those
underground tunnels and starved to death. And here’s something you might not
know but Yanis Virbalis committed suicide because he knew the Soviet authorities
were making moves to extradite him from Canada to stand trial for war crimes in
Lithuania.’

‘Then why did Francis film each of these men?’

‘He’s dead. We can’t ask him. But he took his camera
everywhere. You know that.’

‘OK, then why do you appear in the footage of Rösler and
Frank?’

‘My passport from then will show I was never in Germany, or
Canada, either.’

‘But Bea and Francis were at the relevant times.’

‘Yes, on diplomatic postings of one sort or another – so
what?’

‘But you worked with Virbalis, on the railways. You lodged
across the street from him with old Miss Deware – ’

‘– a woman who’s been blind from birth. What a
compelling witness she makes.’

‘How do you know she’s been blind from birth?’

‘I’m not obliged to tell you, Mac.’

‘So why was Bea giving a talk at the school that Virbalis’s
daughter attended on the very night he supposedly committed suicide?’

‘Mac, Mac – first a blind witness, now an alcoholic... or
had she sobered up by the time you left her bed?’

Even in the desert, Minsky did not need to break sweat to
outbox him.

‘Mac, whatever you
think
you’ve got, it’s going
nowhere... is it?’

Minsky’s whole manner changed then. He pushed back his
curling, silver hair and placed a protective arm around McCall’s shoulder.

‘Let us not fall out about this. Come, let me show you the
world from on top of Masada so you might see a few things about history that
really matter.’

They walked in silence through the roofless buildings where
the rebels against Rome had lived and prayed, kept amphorae of wine, taken
ritual baths and finally slaughtered themselves. The remains of a man and boy
were found intact by that of a young woman, hair still in braids, dainty
leather sandals at her feet, all preserved for two thousand years in the hot,
dry air.

Nearby were pyramids of huge stone balls, still waiting to
be heaved down on an enemy long since gone to dust – just as those he sought to
conquer.

‘That’s all they had back then, Mac... rocks. Rocks against
a Roman legion.’

Minsky leaned over the casemated walls and looked down on
black, fan-tailed ravens wheeling over the wilderness that shimmered into the
Negev desert.

‘You can’t report this on the BBC but we’re making nuclear
bombs over there... a place called Dimona. We never admit it but those who
would push us into the sea know about it... and I’m glad they do for we’ll not
die like we did without price ever again.’

Between Masada and Dimona had come the blood and ashes of
the Holocaust. McCall still believed the three old Nazis died in revenge for
some collective sin from that time – however hard Minsky tried to persuade him
otherwise.

And if McCall now understood how and why his first father
came to be falsely called a murderer, it followed that he felt compelled to
discover what had driven the second to actually become one. McCall would stick
close to Minsky, whatever the risk to his health.