The Brodsky Affair: Murder is a Dying Art (11 page)

In the half-light stood a figure, all in black, wearing a balaclava, standing motionless by the door.  She let out a terrified scream. The figure paused, nodded, turned around, then quickly disappeared like a dark bat from hell.

She scrambled out of her bath. Grabbing a towel, she flung it around herself and rushed to the door. She kicked it shut, and quickly slid the double bolts, turning the key with a savage snap.

“My God, my God, I wasn’t imagining it!” she shouted aloud, leaning heavily on the door with her head pressed hard against it. Her breath came in racking gasps, causing her whole body to shake uncontrollably. “Oh fuck, who was that? Where’s my mobile?” She scrambled around on the floor, but realised she’d left it outside in the other room. She pressed her ear to the door and from the passageway behind, she heard another door hurriedly slam. The radio was still playing and turned it off. She tried listening to every sound, but it was as quiet as a tomb. She peered through the keyhole… nothing

Waiting five minutes more, she slid back the bolts with trepidation, turning the key until she heard the lock disengage. She inched the door open, wide enough for her to step out and also rush back in again if she had to. Tiptoeing across the landing, she left a trail of tacky footprints along the polished wooden floor. But there was nobody to be seen or heard.

Whoever it was had vanished… as if they’d never been there. She knew she hadn’t imagined what she’d seen. That was confirmed when she switched on the lights in the lounge area. One look and she could see the place had been expertly ransacked. It was the same in each room. Drawers, cupboards, beds and sofas were in disarray – emptied, moved or overturned. Whoever it was had been looking for something. An overwhelming sense of unease swept through her. All this had occurred, and she hadn’t heard a thing.
How could that be? How did he get in? What was he after?
With some trepidation she began a careful inspection of each room. Her jewellery, and their ornaments, clothes, cameras, tablets, computers and TVs were untouched.

Weird… nothing appeared to have been taken. What did he want? There’s money to be had in what he left behind.

Her first inclination was to call the police. But of late, they had been refusing many burglary calls.
But we haven’t been burgled, nothing’s been taken. Humiliated, maybe, exposed and violated... but everything is still here. If nothing’s been taken, the police won’t be interested.

After checking all locks, bolts, and keys, she considered her options and selected a long, sharp knife and a heavy hammer. She placed them within easy reach. She made a call to Jack.

He answered. “Tamsin, I’m just about to get myself a pint. What d’you want?”

“We’ve been burgled.”

“What! Say that again.”

She repeated what she’d said.

“Fuck! I hope you’re not joking.”

“I’m not.”

“Tamsin, are you okay?”

She heard the urgency in his voice. “A bit shaky, but oddly okay. Nothing seems to be missing. Can you get back here now, at once please?”

“Call the police.”

“I’m not sure that will be a lot of use. We’ll discuss that later, but just get here please.”

“I’m on my way.” He slammed down his drink and rushed out of the pub.

Twenty minutes later, he burst through the front door. “It’s me, Jack,” he shouted.

“I’m in the lounge,” she called out.

Taking two steps at a time, he sprinted up the stairs, rushed into the lounge where she sat in the centre of a pile of rummaged personal belongings. She stood up, opened her arms and shrugged her shoulders. He grabbed at her and held her tight.

“Are you sure you’re ok?”

“Apart from being demeaned, I’m unharmed.” She stood back and gestured around the room, seeing his shock.

Manton shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair.

“At least the paintings were not here. Thank God I got the Brodskys over to the auctioneers. If they’d been taken, I would have gone mental. Tell me what happened.”

For a moment, his last remark passed her by. She burbled through her account of events, the cold draft, the creaking door, the man in a balaclava, her terror, his hasty exit and her final opening of the door to find the place had been turned over. She paused for breath.

“And what do you mean
at least the paintings were not here
? I could have been raped and murdered. Is that all you really care about… you bastard!”

Jack’s eyes darted nervously and she saw the cornered look on face. The expression of a person who realised they had made a big mistake.

“Oh c’mon, Tamsin. You know it’s not like that. It just seems that those paintings may have been what he was after, not you. Don’t you see that?”

“I do see that, but your priorities are all too evident. I’ll not forget that response.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Tams.” He raised his hands in an apologetic gesture. “What I meant to say was, that would’ve been almost as bad as if something had happened to you, God forbid. Hey, let me get you a drink.”

She gave him a steely look. Feeling too tired to pick up the argument, she let him push her down onto the sofa.

“Don’t move. I’ll fix you one.” A few minutes later he reappeared, holding a generous gin and tonic with lumps of cracked ice and lemon.

She gave an exasperated look. “Thanks.” She snatched at it and couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“You need it.” What she was experiencing was beyond him. “Just one thing, what was the name of that person who called while I was out?”

“Oh yes, his name was Toby Walker. He said he’d call again.”

His expression tightened.

“I think you’d better look at this. I found it under the phone in the other room.” He handed her a small business card. She read it and her cheeks whitened. Written in ink were the words,
I said I would call again.
Beneath that, embossed in fine black, italic script:

Toby Walker

IAS

Chapter Eleven

Majdanek Concentration Camp, near Lublin, Poland, November 1941

M
ikhail’s shivers consumed him as he huddled in the corner of the open-topped cattle car, one of twenty-one that rattled and groaned in unison behind a locomotive. Its front was draped in the red, white and black Nazi flag, displaying its swastika with menacing triumph.

He bent his head low behind others as he attempted to shield himself from the wind’s bitter blasts, intermittent snow flurries and the intense cold. He tried making himself smaller, pulling his coat and scarf tighter around him. He’d been standing for five hours without sanitation or food. Like others around him, he urinated where he stood. The wooden floor stank of the human waste that forced its way into his thin shoes. There had been several stops to load up and attach more trucks to the last car on each stop. He’d lost count of the times he’d attempted to count the number of trucks and people. In his own car, there were fifty-one people, but couldn’t be sure how many stood lower down and out of sight.

There had to be seven to eight hundred on this train alone. This is really not possible. Am I dreaming?

At times. he thought of Lev and Sofia, and he prayed silently for their safety. He was aware of the Nazis’ attitude to contemporary painting and anything Jewish. Unless the fascists could be defeated, he might never be allowed to paint again. The thought overwhelmed him.

My life has been my art, my painting. We do what we can do in this life and I have tried to do so. I have done what I was best at. My paintings speak for me. Without my painting, I would rather die! I’m not sorry for the life I’ve led.

A change in the rhythm of the train’s wheels and speed caused a series of jolts that rippled through all the cars, signalling that the train was slowing. Squinting hard through the damp flurries, he could see a station up ahead approaching. He heard shouting.

“This is it. We’ve arrived.”

There followed a wailing protest of iron and steel under stress. The train crossed over a points system, with much hissing and spouts of steam, before it came to a halt along the length of an extensive, stretched-out siding alongside a low building. A sign marked it as the
SS Bekleidungswerke.
It was the SS Fur and Clothing wing of Majdanek Camp.

The sides of the trucks were immediately opened, and each dropping broad wooden ramps the hardened ground. Guards moved in with machine guns, sticks, whips and slavering dogs. They began shouting and yelling at the prisoners.

“
Raus! Raus! Jüdiche schaum raus! Jüdenschweine, Judensau raus, raus!
”

Mikhail, along with others, was shoved down a sharp ramp and hit with a large stick, accompanied by the bellows and crude yells of grim and forbidding guards. He was marched into a group of people, then they were then split into groups of five. Holding on to his baggage, he was quick-marched towards the main camp, and informed that it was one-and-a-half kilometres away. Such was their speed that one of the men could not keep pace and began to stumble backwards. The guards set on the terrified man with savagery, beating him with whips and sticks, encouraging their dog to tear at the man’s clothes and flesh. Forced to his feet, the petrified man broke into a sob. Mikhail held out his hand and helped pull him along.

Mikhail found the pace punishing and his breath came in spasmodic wheezes which he buried into a dirty handkerchief. Finally, they arrived at the camp gates, heavily guarded and topped with swirls of unforgiving barbed wire. Covered watchtowers were manned by men with machine guns, every fifty metres. Two armed guards directed them to Barrack 44 where all their possessions and clothing would be handed over to supervisors.

Mikhail’s instant concern was for his unfinished painting, rolled tight in soft canvas and thick cloth.
They can do what they like with me but they are never having that… Never! I’d rather die. I must hide it, but where? Where?

Up ahead, he could see a queue of people forming alongside a row of barracks. One was marked in big black numbers: 44. The buildings were long and made of wood. In places, they were raised off the ground on an array of small stilts. Their guard bawled them to a halt. Then he moved up the row and went to talk to another guard in the group ahead.

Mikhail saw his chance. Bending over to cough, he pulled the rolled triptych from his bag, placed it to his lips and kissed it as if he was saying farewell to a lover, and rolled it as hard and as far he could beneath the upraised barrack, numbered 42.

He hadn’t been seen.

Throwing his head back, he inhaled a lungful of wintry air. He thrust his hands deeper into his coat pockets, knowing with certainty that a nightmare was about to unfurl. Looking at the ground, cracked and blacker than ink, he thought he could hear the whisper of death in its furrows.

His group continued to move in a plodding shuffle, hunched like sacks of rotten potatoes to be registered at Barrack 44. In front of the depressing structure, he could see an array of desks waiting for them, manned by stiff men of merciless authority.

~ * ~

Three weeks had passed. Mikhail became part of the degradation and humiliation that reduced people to the basest of survival strategies. He had lost track of the days and the routine beatings, punishments and whippings that had reduced him to a level less than that of a pig going to slaughter. Gone were his fine silk scarf and sturdy Russian winter clothes, replaced by thin, ill-fitting striped trousers and a button less jacket, on which was stitched a triangular patch bearing the letters ‘SU’, indicating he was Russian. On his feet he wore wooden clogs, and on his head, he wore a small round cap without a peak. He lived in these clothes. Worked, washed, shitted, pissed and slept in them. Dying is his only hope for release.

The SS tattooed their prisoners with numbers, either on their chests or arms. Mikhail’s number was branded on his arm. He’d endured the three roll calls per day that started at four o’clock in the morning, and often stood at attention for hours on end, regardless of the weather. To miss roll call would result in a lengthy public beating by the Kapos or SS who enjoyed their work. This would be carried out on a large table made especially for punishment. Anybody found asleep at work should expect the ultimate punishment – execution on the barracks gallows.

His health had weakened and the coughing got worse. With only meals of cabbage soup, weed tea, and seven ounces of bread per day, he’d lost hope. He looked at his once soft hands, now blistered with coarse skin, welts and scabs. His past as an artist had faded into a far memory. Artists, writers, teachers, or lecturers were considered the lowest, and Mikhail became one of the doomed prisoners. He was designated as part of the
Scheisskommando.
That meant cleaning faeces and waste from the cesspools throughout the camp. Repulsive as it was, he found it had an advantage. Since the smell was so foul, the group was left alone. When he wasn’t cleaning up shit, he was forced to mix cement for the construction of other barrack blocks.

One morning, after being allowed a night’s sleep in a dank corner of a communal, three-tiered bunk along with dozens of others, he found himself taken off the
Scheisskommando
and permanently mixing cement in a construction unit, barrowing it to workers building additional prisoner blocks. He found the work backbreaking. The icy wind would freeze the sweat on his skin and his bones often ached.

Even in this cold horror, something about the scene nagged away at his perceptions.
In the middle of all this shit, there is still beauty… sunlight on the wheelbarrow, the symmetry of stripes on our clothing, the work rhythms… yet… yet all knit together with pain and death. Even in that can be found harmony…
For a brief moment that thought released Mikhail from the pain and suffering around him.

He no longer felt afraid.

But to move his barrow required a strength he didn’t possess. In attempting to, his fragile lungs would descend into a spasm of spluttering that he found hard to repress.