Pilgrim Soul (2 page)

‘Never believe the papers, Shimon. How have you been?’

I’d last seen him just before the war in the wreckage of his small furniture store in Bell Street. Some cretins had paid their own small act of homage to Kristallnacht. All his windows were in smithereens and his stock smashed. But the perpetrators hadn’t been paying real attention; the legs of the daubed swastikas faced left, the wrong way for a Nazi tribute. Unless of course they really meant to hansel the building with the gracious Sanskrit symbol. We caught the culprits, a wayward unit of the Brigton Billy Boys led personally by Billy Fullerton, who wanted to show solidarity with his Blackshirt brethren in the East End of London.

‘Getting by, Douglas, getting by. But we need your services.’

‘You want me to write an article?’

He looked at me through his beard. A rueful smile showed.

‘We could do with some good publicity.’

‘You need more than a
Gazette
column.’

No one had to mention the headlines in these first two weeks of November: ‘Stern Gang terrorist arrested in Glasgow’; ‘800 Polish Jews held in South of Scotland’; ‘MI5 searching for Jewish terrorists’; ‘Irgun Zvai Leumi agents at large’.

The factions fighting to establish a Jewish state in Palestine were exporting their seething anger and violence to Britain. Poor thanks for trying to midwife the birth of a new nation already disowned by every other country in the Middle East.

Shimon nodded. ‘Not even Steinbeck could improve our standing. But that’s not why we’re here. We are being robbed.’

‘Dial 999.’

He shook his head. ‘They don’t come, Douglas. Your former colleagues are too busy to bother with a bunch of old Jews.’

Isaac interjected from the other side of the table: ‘They came the first few times, but lost interest.’

Tomas Meras leaned forward, his bottle glasses glinting from the light above the table. Tomas had been introduced as
Dr Tomas
, a lecturer in physics at Glasgow University.

‘Mr Brodie, we pay our taxes. We work in the community. We are
Glaswegians
. We expect an equal share of the services of the community.’ His vowels were long and carefully shaped, as though he polished them every night.

I knew what they were saying. It wasn’t that the police were anti-Semites. Or not
just
. They were even-handed with their casual bigotry: anyone who wasn’t a Mason or card-carrying Protestant got third-rate attention. Jews were at the bottom of the pecking order when it came to diligent community law enforcement, alongside Irish Catholics. On the other hand crime was rare in the Jewish community. Self-enforcing morality. Glasgow’s finest were used to leaving them to their own devices until whatever small dust storm had been kicked up had settled.

‘First few times, Isaac? How many are we talking about and what sort of thefts? I mean, are these street robberies or burglaries? Shops or houses?’

Shimon was nodding. ‘Our homes are being broken into. Eight so far.’

‘Nine, Shimon. Another last night,’ said the fourth man, Jacob Mendelsohn, waving a wonderfully scented Sobranie for emphasis. As a tobacconist, he could afford them. It went well with his slick centre parting and his neat moustache. A Cowcaddens dandy out of central casting.

‘Nine is an epidemic,’ I said.

They were all nodding now. I looked round at these men and marvelled at the capacity of humans to uproot themselves and travel to a far-off land with weird customs and languages and make a home for themselves and their families. How did these innocents or their forebears fare when they encountered their first Orange Parade or Hogmanay? What use was their careful cultivation of a second language like English when faced by a wee Glesga bachle in full flow? Urdu speakers stood a better chance.

I thought about what they were asking of me. It didn’t seem much, yet I wondered if my heart would be in it. I used to be a thief-taker but I’d moved on. The world had moved on. Did I care? Was I still up to it? I wouldn’t give my answer this evening, but in the meantime . . .

‘Gentlemen’ – I flipped open my reporter’s notebook – ‘tell me more.’ I began scribbling in my improving shorthand.

TWO

Sometimes I like to just sit in a pub, a pint in one hand, a book or newspaper in the other, fags at the ready. Time to myself but surrounded by other folk. A social antisocial. Wanting to be part of something but not tied to it. It summed up what I was and what I’d become.

It was the night after I’d met the Jewish gang and I wanted to digest their plea for help. I’d talked about it with Sam when they’d gone but her enthusiasm was getting in the way of my personal analysis. I needed quiet time to give her and them my answer. I worried that my decision would be driven solely by the money. Not that money in the pocket is a bad motivation.

It wasn’t that I needed to weigh up the morality of the challenge. The poor sods must feel their persecution would never end. The British were hardly in the same league of villainy as Hitler and his gang, but our troops were throwing them back in the sea off their promised land and banging up eight hundred veterans of the Italian campaign in case one or two were Jewish terrorists.

The job needed doing and if the Glasgow cops didn’t have the time or inclination to catch a thief, then I saw no reason in principle not to help these good citizens. I just wanted to be sure I knew where I was going with this latest diversion. I was beginning to lose my bearings. If I ever had any. No job seemed right for me. No clear path. How long could a grown man go on being a dilettante?

I’d had enough of sore feet and trenches, and had the medals to prove it. And despite the blandishments of the top brass there was no going back to the soul-sapping work of a policeman. But four months into the newspaper game I was frustrated. Sam – cool, perceptive Samantha Campbell – with her lawyer’s insight had stripped back my illusions to reveal some sort of would-be knight errant, handier with a gun and his fists than with his dreaming pen.

And yet, with this offer from Garnethill, was I seriously contemplating becoming a
private
detective? Would it be one skirmish, and then back to reporting? Could it be a career move? Did I
have
a career? Or was I just one of life’s drunks, stumbling along, oblivious and falling into situations – scrapes usually.

I looked round the pub at my fellow drinkers. There were a few loners gazing into their glasses or examining the runes of the racing pages. My future selves? I hefted my glass and pondered having another, but I’d had enough of introspection. I walked out into a night as dreich as a child’s funeral. I pulled my hat down and pulled up my coat collar against the cold drizzle.

I zigzagged up the hill to Sam’s house and let myself in. She called down from the lounge.

‘There’s some cold ham under a plate, if you haven’t been to the Tallies.’

‘Thanks.’ I hung my coat and hat up, went down and made a ham sandwich. I took it up to join her. She looked up from her book with a smile. The Light Programme hummed softly in the background.

‘Well, Douglas?’ She meant, had I decided.

I shrugged. ‘Why not, Sam? Why not.’

I made an early start on Monday with a plunge into the great pool of the Western Baths Club. It had become a ritual, a penance and my salvation. A cure for hangovers and a banishment of the blues. By eight o’clock I was bashing through the swing doors of the
Gazette
’s newsroom as though I had a calling. No sign yet of Sandy Logan, former blue-pencil maestro in the sub’s chair and now acting editor in the absence of Eddie Paton.

My aim was to clear the decks by lunchtime and then visit some of the crime scenes for my new employers. My
supplementary
employers. I reasoned that whatever came out of it – twenty quid a week for a few weeks not being the least of it – I was also garnering material for the crime column. I won every way you looked at it. I felt eager, like an old bloodhound with a fresh scent. I was even whistling as I typed.

With no boss around this morning, I could press on with a final draft of a piece I’d been working on about corruption in local politics: a seemingly bottomless cesspit. During his reign before the war, Chief Constable Sillitoe banged up so many city fathers for graft that he was warned by the government that if one more went down, they would disband the council and run it from Whitehall.

From my recent personal experience things hadn’t improved, though two of the venal councillors had received a grislier come-uppance than a mere prison sentence. I was now exploring other fishy contracts awarded without public tender to the good cousin of the ways and means chairman.

By one o’clock I was walking past the bustling shops in Sauchiehall Street. I turned up on to Renfrew Street just so I could pass Mackintosh’s School of Art. Not just for the fancy windows and portals. The girls at art college had always been more interesting than the bluestockings reading English. Bohemian Scots. Educated but wild at heart. A potent mix. Another climb up Thistle Street on to Hill Street and I was walking along the ridge of Garnethill.

Up here the criss-crossing streets were formed of the same grand red sandstone terraces, but, being perched on a hill, there was a brightness, an expansiveness to the place that was missing in the flatlands south of the Clyde. The folk themselves seemed less huddled, more prosperous. Maybe they were just fitter from clambering up and down hills all day.

I walked into the echoing stone close with its smell of carbolic soap and climbed two flights of spotless clean stairs. I had a choice of doors and peered at the name plates: Kennedy or Bernstein. Applying my great investigative powers I knocked on the latter. I heard bolts sliding. The door opened and I was looking down at a tiny man with watery eyes blinking through thick specs held together at the bridge by Elastoplast. He wore two cardigans, baggy trousers and slippers.

‘Mr Bernstein? It’s Douglas Brodie, sir. I’m working for Shimon Belsinger and his colleagues. Investigating the thefts. Shimon said he’d warn you.’

‘
Ja, ja
. Come in, come in.’

He shuffled off down the narrow corridor of brown-painted walls. I followed, breathing used air mixed with cooking smells. We emerged into a sitting room. A massive three-piece suite hogged the floor. Lost among the cushions and antimacassars was a tiny woman. She wore a curly russet wig that belied her mottled and sagging skin. A much younger woman occupied one of the big chairs. A big-eyed child curled in her lap, thumb firmly jammed in her mouth.

The old man turned to me. ‘This is my wife, Mrs Bernstein. My daughter, Ruth, and my grand-daughter, Lisa.’ His voice softened when he mentioned the baby. His accent was thick and guttural with ‘wife’ coming out as a ‘vife’. He spoke slowly to make sure he’d said it right.

I took a chance and replied in German. ‘Good afternoon. I’m here to see if we can catch the thief.’

The old woman’s head jerked up. The young woman smiled. The old man’s shoulders dropped and he said, ‘Belsinger told me you spoke German. But why do you have a München accent?’

I smiled. ‘I practised with Isaac Feldman and his wife, Hannah – rest her soul – when I was studying at Glasgow University. It upset my tutors.’

Now the old woman broke in, using her native tongue, and I recognised the softer accent of Austria. ‘They say you were an officer in the British Army. You saw it all.’ The question was loaded with meaning:
You saw what they did to us . . .

‘After the surrender I was assigned to interrogate
Schutzstaffel
officers; senior SS camp commanders, doctors and Gestapo.’

Three pairs of adult eyes bored into me. I had brought horror into the room and they didn’t know whether to examine it further through my memories or to banish it and me before it could swallow them up. The child sensed tension and burrowed into her mother’s arms. This time it was the young woman who spoke, in English with a Glasgow lilt.

‘Come on now, Mama, Papa, Mr Brodie is here to help. We don’t want to hear war stories, do we? What do you want to ask us, Mr Brodie? Papa, let him sit. Where are our manners?’

I took out my notebook. ‘Tell me what happened?’

Bernstein began, ‘It is a short story. We go to
shul
on the Sabbath. The Garnethill Synagogue. Every week, same time.’

‘Sometimes we go to my sister’s first, Jacob.’

‘Yes, yes, yes. But when we go straight there it’s at the same time.’

‘Except on Hanukkah or Passover of course. Then we—’

The old man flung up his arms and switched to German. ‘
Mein Gott
, Mrs Bernstein!
Usually
. That’s all Mr Brodie wants to know. Usually. And when the theft took place, it was a usual Sabbath.’

‘I was just saying. Explaining it right.’

Bernstein turned to me and gave me a look of complicity.
Women? What can you do?

I took the baton. ‘So, when was this?’

‘The twelfth of October. I sold a fine little Austin the day before.’

‘You’re a car dealer?’ He nodded. ‘You all went? The house was left empty?’

‘Ach, yes. But we locked up. Every window. Every door. Even the doors inside, you understand?’

‘How long were you gone?’

The old woman said, ‘We sometimes make it a nice day. After we walk down to Sauchiehall Street and maybe have some tea and cakes.’

The old man rolled his eyes. ‘But not this day, Mrs Bernstein. Not that day. We just came home for
Seudah Shilishit
, the third meal.’

‘I’m just saying. Sometimes—’

‘But this day, we – came – home. Straight home. No diversion. It takes us ten minutes to walk there.’

‘So you were gone . . .?’

‘Two hours, maybe two and a half.’

‘And what happened when you got home? What did you find?’

‘A nightmare! That’s what we found!’ said Mrs Bernstein. ‘Our lives thrown upside down, that’s what happened. My jewels. My mother’s jewels. My best china. Except these cups. They were a wedding present and I kept them in a box . . . All gone. And my earrings, my lovely earrings . . .’ Her old eyes filled and she stumbled to a halt.