The Final Judgement

by Daniel Easterman

Genres: Thrillers; Mystery

Synopsis

A young boy is kidnapped and his captors make outrageous ransom demands. Desperate, the boy's father calls upon his estranged brother-in-law for help. Yosef Abuhatseira is the perfect man for the job: an Israeli patriot, a born hunter, a one-man army of survival skills. Yet nothing Yosef has ever experienced can prepare him for what the rescue mission reveals. The kidnapping, it seems, is only the beginning. Soon a series of killings leads Yosef to the sickening realization that someone is murdering survivors of Auschwitz. Now he must penetrate the deadly wall of secrecy that surrounds the organization responsible, before they can let loose another Final Solution on humanity.

Release date: December 4, 2014

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

1

The first thing that told Aryeh Levin something was wrong was the silence. It was the middle of the night, surely there was nothing out of the ordinary? But the silence worried him the moment he woke. He had known similar silences in the old days with the army in Lebanon, silences that came just before a burst of shelling or the dull thump of an explosion. He knew there was something not right about this one, too.

To begin with, what had awakened him? Had there been a noise? He normally slept straight through, unless his son Yoel woke and called him, which was rare these days. Chaya, his wife, was fast asleep next to him. He sat up and looked down at her, at her soft profile, her bare shoulders. She always slept on her stomach, had done so since childhood, or so she said. Moonlight fell across her face. He reached out to remove a strand of hair from her eyes. They had been married eleven years, but still he could not get over the pleasure of being in bed with her each night.

What was wrong? What had awakened him? He strained his ears, but could hear nothing, and he knew that was wrong, that a sound was missing that should have been there. He should get out of bed, go downstairs and investigate. But what should he look for?

It was then he realized what it was. The alarm system had stopped working. Ordinarily, a small unit in the bedroom emitted an almost inaudible beep every minute. It provided a means of checking that the system was in working order. He looked round. The little red light on the control panel had gone out.

Two things happened quickly after that. Yoel cried out, a loud, frightened shout in Italian, then Hebrew: “Papa, papa, aiuto! Abba, hatzilu! Hatzilu!” Simultaneous with the cry–or a little before it, a little after, who could tell?–the door of the bedroom burst open.

The room flooded with light. Two hooded men were standing just inside the doorway holding sawed-off shotguns. Chaya woke abruptly, saw the men, and started screaming. The taller of the two intruders stepped quickly to the bedside and struck her hard across the cheek with the back of his hand, the force enough to send her reeling back against the headboard.

“Sta’ zitta, puttana!” he yelled.

Aryeh made to grab him, but as he did so felt the cold, hard touch of a gun barrel pressed against his neck.

“Non fa’ stupidàggine.” The voice was guttural, the accent impossible for Aryeh to guess. Sardinian, almost certainly.

He felt himself go limp. Beside him, Chaya was weeping silently, her hand pressed against her cheek.

“What do you want? I don’t keep money in the house. But you can take anything else you like as long as you keep your filthy hands off my wife and son.”

In answer, the man who had struck Chaya took a long, coiled rope from a canvas bag he had been carrying over one shoulder. That was when Aryeh understood what was happening.

“My son!” he shouted. “Where is he? What have you done with him?”

His captors did not answer. Instead, the man with the rope reached for Chaya and pulled her naked and yelling out of the bed. Aryeh again made to help her, and again the man next to him pressed the gun against his neck. He knew the intruder would use the weapon if he had to. He had known men like this before: a different nationality, a different religion–if any of them could be said to truly have any religion but violence–but the same strict adherence to the rules by which they lived.

“Yoel!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Yoel, don’t worry. I’ll get you back. . . . I’ll find you, I’ll . . .”

The blow took him on the back of the skull. Unconsciousness was immediate, black, and hungry. It devoured him in a single, greedy gulp.

When he came to, sunshine was streaming into the bedroom. His head felt as though it had been removed with a wrench, then replaced with a jackhammer. Every time he tried to open his eyes, the pain was intense. A gray wave of nausea rushed up from his stomach; gagged as he was, he knew he would choke to death if he threw up. With an effort, he fought the sickness down until he could breathe without making himself sick. He forced himself to keep his eyes tightly shut, desperate as he was to see what had happened in the room.

Slowly, the screaming ache inside his head slowed down to a dull throbbing. He was sitting naked in a chair. He tried to move, but could not: something was holding him fast. He forced his eyes open.

They had tied him to a chair using lengths of rope. Near him, her eyes wide-open with fear and her mouth gagged like his, Chaya sat bound in another chair. She was also naked. Aryeh swore that if they had laid a finger on her, he would hunt them to the ends of the earth for his revenge. And then he remembered Yoel, and knew that he would hunt them anyway.

There was nothing he could do now but sit and comfort Chaya with glances. She must have guessed. She had known the risks of living in this place. They had arrived on Sardinia’s Costa Smeralda eight years earlier, not long after Yoel was born. Aryeh had wanted his son to grow up away from Israel, away from the constant violence and racism that were infecting the country and that had turned the Zionist dream of his parents into a nightmare.

There had only ever been one drawback to Sardinia–its reputation as a center for kidnap and extortion. But after Aryeh’s tour as a conscript with the army in Lebanon, that had seemed little more than a children’s game.

Until now. Now, Yoel was gone, abducted and taken into the mountains to be hidden, guarded by shepherds who knew how to keep their mouths shut, until the ransom was paid. Or. . . . Aryeh tried not to think about that. But as he sat in the chair, sickened by the smell of vomit, weeping, dizzy, he swore that whatever happened, he would have his revenge.

They were found shortly after 8:00 A.M. by Maria Deiana, the housekeeper. Some of the wealthier citizens of the Costa Smeralda kept large staffs–labor on the island was cheap, as it always had been. Poverty was still endemic. The little money that had ever come into Sardinia from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno had been channeled into the pockets of just about everyone who had been meant to benefit. Huge factories got built in Cagliari or Porto Torres, but they produced more smoke than jobs. The rich, as always, could well afford the services of the poor.

But the Levins kept a simple household. Maria was their housekeeper, cook, and nanny combined, and Aryeh paid her well. A gardener came two or three days a week. Neither he nor Maria lived in. That was all. Aryeh drove himself to work in Porto Cervo every morning, leaving Yoel off at the Abbiadori school in Arzachena on the way.

He heard Maria coming through the house, shouting their names, her voice puzzled and a little anxious. The family was usually up and about at this hour, and Yoel had always greeted her with a rundown of the day ahead. The boy spoke Sardinian dialect fluently, and neither Aryeh nor Chaya could keep up with him. He and Maria were the closest of friends; she had six children of her own, and Yoel often went to their home to play. Some of Aryeh’s colleagues disapproved of such close contact with “the peasants,” but he paid as little attention to them as he had to friends in Tel Aviv who had warned him against associating with Muslims or Christians.

The first thing Maria saw when she entered the bedroom was Aryeh sitting naked in his chair. Her immediate reaction was a scream, followed immediately by a flurry of fingers as she crossed herself again and again. She then lifted her apron until it covered her face. Keeping it firmly in place, she stumbled across to Aryeh and pulled the gag from his mouth. Shocked by the sight of him, she had not noticed Chaya, just out of her line of sight.

“La signora!” she said. “Dov’è la signora?”

“It’s all right, Maria, Chaya’s all right. She’s on the other side of the room. Now, take that ridiculous apron off your face and get me untied.”

But Maria was not prepared to risk the impropriety of fiddling with knots on a naked man’s torso. Squinting round the edge of her apron, she spied Chaya and made her way across the room to her. A naked woman was not entirely proper either, but she presented considerably fewer perils to Maria’s honor.

The housekeeper untied the gag, then busied herself with the ropes that held Chaya to the chair, muttering all the while to herself in Sardinian. Her hands were trembling, and tears ran unchecked down her face. She did not even ask after Yoel: the moment she had entered the bedroom she had guessed what had happened. The Anonima had come for the child, and in a day or two there would be a ransom demand. She had lived with such things all her life. There were men in her own family who had been imprisoned as rapitori.

At first, Chaya could not speak, only gasp in air frantically like someone who has been drowning. Her panting, wheezing battle for air reminded Maria that her mistress suffered from asthma.

“Dov’è il vostro inalatore?” she asked.

Chaya could hardly get the words out.

“Ne . . . nel . . . cassetto . . . Nella . . . toi . . . toilette.”

Lifting her apron again, Maria Deiana crept across to the dressing table and opened the drawer. The gray-blue inhaler was at the front. She brought it to Chaya and held her hand steady while Chaya pressed dose after dose of the Ventolin into her lungs. Gradually, the wheezing smoothed out and Chaya’s breathing became easier. Maria untied the remaining knots and let the ropes fall to the floor. She reached out a hand and wiped the tears from Chaya’s cheek, then fetched her robe from where it lay across the foot of the bed. Still shaking, Chaya pulled it on. She was numb, unable to think or act.

The next moment, apron in place, Maria dashed out of the bedroom, leaving Chaya to untie her husband. In other circumstances, they would have found her behavior comic, but they were far from laughter. Chaya dragged herself weakly out of the chair. After hours of sitting immobile, every muscle in her body felt strained beyond measure. Each step she took was an agony.

They did not speak. Chaya bent down and laid her head against her husband’s shoulder, speechless, like stone, and for a very long time she did not move. Then, coming slowly to life, she began to untie the tight knots that held him. The knots might have been evidence for anyone who knew about such things. Whoever had tied them was or had been a seaman, but almost certainly not a Sardinian fisherman. With broken nails and shaking fingers, Chaya loosened them forever.

When Aryeh was free, she turned suddenly.

“Yoel,” she said. “I have to go to him. He’ll wonder what’s happening. I have to get him ready for school.”

With a soft gesture that felt harsh, he grabbed her arm and pulled her to him.

“Yoel’s gone,” he said. “They’ve taken him. He’s been kidnapped.”

She looked at him as if she did not believe him, as if she had never believed anything he had ever said to her.

And then she screamed, and went on screaming until he held her to him and stroked her hair and silenced her. When she was quiet, he was more disturbed. He felt it was a quietness that might never leave her, not even if her son was returned.

He took her into the bathroom, where he washed and dried her face before doing anything about himself. From the shower he watched her, not knowing what to do or say. Water did not help to wash any of the bitterness or grief away. He toweled himself dry. Chaya watched him without moving, sitting on the side of the bath.

“Do you want a shower?” he asked. “It’ll make you feel better. It’s going to be a hard day.”

And how many hard days would follow before Yoel was safely back with them? He knew these things could take weeks, even months, before reaching a satisfactory conclusion. And sometimes the families could not pay. When that happened . . . Well, the kidnappers were businessmen, not gamblers. A dead victim was as useful to them in the long run as a live one. The next family in line would pay up all the faster. Aryeh was sick at heart because he knew how much he was worth, and he did not think the kidnappers knew just how little that really was. They would ask for more than he could possibly pay. And his son would die.

They returned to the bedroom and changed into fresh clothes. Watching Chaya dress, he was frightened by how much she had altered in a matter of hours. Yesterday, she had been tall, upright, full of life; now she was bent, her breasts sagged, her hair hung limp, her shoulders were rounded, and even her skin seemed gray. He did not try to look at himself in the mirror.

There was a knock on the door. Maria Deiana appeared carrying a tray on which were a large pot of black coffee and three large glasses of aquavite, the local aromatic version of grappa.

“I’ve called Dr. Talanas,” she said. “He’s coming as quickly as possible. And Father Cavia. I hope you don’t mind, I know you aren’t Catholics. But he knows how to help in these matters. How to keep his mouth shut. He’ll be a help, you’ll see.”

They said nothing. What did it matter who they saw? Aryeh downed his aquavite in a single gulp, and followed it with a cup of caffè ristretto. After a second cup, he got up and crossed the room to the telephone. Best to get it over with. He picked up the receiver and dialed.

“Cento tredici. Desidera?”

“La polizia, per favore.”

“Sì. Che numero ha?”

At that moment, someone banged their hand down on the telephone, cutting off the call. It was Maria.

“Scusi, signore, scusi. It would be a great mistake to telephone the police. Surely you have not forgotten.”

Of course. How could he have been so stupid? The police were the last people he wanted involved. In 1991 new antisequestro legislation had been passed by parliament in an attempt to control the epidemic of abductions throughout Italy. The chief provision of the law–and the one that had caused the most controversy–was that, on notification of a kidnapping, the state had the power to freeze the funds of the victim’s family. The theory was that if would-be kidnappers knew that no one would be able to pay up, they would be forced to think of better ways of earning a dishonest living. In practice, desperate families found ways round the law, money changed hands when the police had their backs turned, and the abductions went on as before.

Aryeh replaced the receiver.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed. It was then it came to him that he had nowhere to turn for help. He was a stranger here, without ties or contacts. He had no influence, no levers to pull, no godfather to call on. All he could do was sit and wait for the telephone to ring.

2

The call came shortly after midnight. They had passed a day like no other. It had been as though they had been cut off at once from the world and from themselves, severed from every emotion but that of misery. All day they stayed within reach of the telephone, and all day it stubbornly refused to ring. Aryeh had phoned in to his office, pleading illness. Maria had tendered Chaya’s apologies for not turning up at a bridge party in Porto Cervo. The day had dragged past minutes at a time, dreadful with silences and a nagging feeling of absence.

The doctor gave Chaya pills. It was all he could do. This was not the first time he had been called out to such a case, and it would not be the last. He said nothing, pretended to believe their story about bad news from Israel, and left with vague reassurances. He would confide in his wife, of course, and she in her small circle of friends. They would tell their husbands, and their husbands would chat in the bar. In a matter of days, word of the Levin kidnapping would make its way round the Costa Smeralda.

Dr. Talanas was followed almost immediately by Father Cavia, the parish priest. A short, brooding man from Orgosolo, he was well-versed in the ways of the Barbagian brigands, much less in the needs and feelings of their victims. He attempted to reassure Yoel’s parents with platitudes, and suggested they attend mass in his church the following Sunday. No matter that they were not believers, he insisted, the Church was universal and Jesus had room in his heart for everyone. They asked him if Jesus had room for their son. Of course, he said, Jesus had room for everyone, even the boy’s kidnappers. Aryeh asked him to leave.

Maria Deiana watched the priest go with a mixture of relief and fear. She wanted him involved, less for any spiritual solace he could have given them than for his potential usefulness as a go-between.

*     *     *

Father Cavia reminded Aryeh of his grandfather, Zalman. The old man had been a Lithuanian rabbi, black-bearded, black-coated, steeped in tradition–a mitnagid, intellectual and unemotional. As a child, Aryeh had always been afraid of him; now his fear had changed to pity as he watched the old rabbi struggle to come to terms with a world he would never understand.

Aryeh’s father had been born and brought up in Israel, had fought in the ’67 war, and had opened a French restaurant in Tel Aviv soon afterward. The food was as kosher as Aryeh’s French mother was Jewish, but that was beside the point as far as the old man was concerned. He had wanted his sons to study Torah and Talmud, and to follow the Shulhan Arukh as he had done. Instead, he had seen the world around him change beyond recognition, and not for the better.

Aryeh had followed his parents in their liberal faith and their belief in a secular, Zionist state, but his war had been in Lebanon, and his childhood lessons had been shattered by the role in which he found himself. After finishing his army service in 1984, he had gone into partnership with his father and two uncles, opening a luxury hotel in Herzliyya. He married Chaya the following year, and for a while everything went well. They were happy together, the hotel was flourishing, they talked about starting a family in a year or two.

But there were tensions between their families. Chaya’s family were Sephardic Jews who had made aliya from Morocco in the late sixties, one of the last Jewish families to leave the country. They were right-wing, impatient with the crippled liberal state of the European Zionists, and they made no secret of their hatred for Arabs. Chaya’s oldest brother had until recently belonged to Israel’s elite antiterrorist unit, the Sayaret Matkal, and had been involved in numerous raids across the Lebanese border, both during and after the invasion. By the time he and Chaya had been married two years, it seemed that Aryeh and his brother-in-law could not meet without an acrimonious argument breaking out over one aspect or another of Israeli policy.

When the intifada broke out in 1988, Aryeh found his confidence slipping faster than ever. Rabbi Meir Kahane was preaching hate sermons everywhere and calling for the expulsion of all Arabs from the Holy Land. Aryeh’s grandfather took to spending his days alone in his room, praying and studying Torah; he would never criticize Kahane openly, but he had seen hatred like this before, and he knew where it could lead. In 1989 Aryeh and Chaya’s first child had been born. An anti-Arab demonstration had passed the hospital that same day. To Aryeh, it had seemed like a portent.

In the end, he could see no future in staying where he was. He took his wife and child to the other end of the Mediterranean, to Sardinia. It was not a random choice. A Palestinian friend, Abbas al-Khalil, had moved to the island several years earlier and already had a thriving business in Olbia.

Back in the sixties, the Aga Khan and several of his associates had bought up land cheaply on Sardinia’s northeast coast. They had proceeded to turn the area–the Costa Smeralda or Emerald Coast–into one of the world’s most luxurious holiday playgrounds.

Aryeh’s friend knew of a hotel that had just gone on the market in Porto Cervo. Aryeh had managed to scrape together enough money to invest in the business, and a month later he had bought the house in nearby Arzachena.

“Abbiamo vostro figlio.” A woman’s voice, hard and emotionless. “We have your son. He is safe, and he will not be harmed if you follow our instructions. How soon you see him again depends on you. Consider this a simple business transaction. A little money in return for your son’s life.”

The voice was not Sardinian, Aryeh was sure of that, but he could not place the accent with greater exactitude. Southern rather than northern, he thought. Calabrian, perhaps.

“How much?” he asked.

“Nothing you can’t afford. Four thousand million lire.”

Aryeh felt the breath leave his chest as though he had been punched in the stomach. He almost dropped the receiver.

“That’s impossible,” he said. “I don’t have anything like that.”

The line went dead and he was left staring at the receiver. His hand shook as he replaced it. Four thousand million lire! As had been his habit from his first days in Sardinia, he converted the sum to dollars: five million. There was no way he could find a sum like that, nor anything close to it. He had a twenty percent share in the Hotel Giudichessa Eleonora, but he had signed agreements when he entered the partnership making it impossible for him to withdraw his investment without several months’ notice. Unless he was incredibly lucky and managed to keep Yoel’s abduction a secret, his partners would see to it that the law was enforced and his assets frozen. In any case, his twenty percent was still well below the figure demanded. Even if he sold everything he had, he would still be short by at least two thousand million lire.

He had always thought that the kidnap gangs did their homework before selecting a victim. They were, as they always said, businessmen trying to earn a living, and there was no point in their spending time and money on an enterprise that would never pay. A mistake had been made. They had confused him with someone else, taken his child instead of another man’s. He knew that he had to convince them of that, otherwise he would never see his son again.

That night he hardly slept. Beside him, Chaya lay in a drugged sleep in which she tossed and turned feverishly. For hours he went through his finances in his head, picking through every thread, unraveling every knot, weighing risk against risk, certainty against uncertainty. Daylight found him in the study at his desk, sweating, exhausted, surrounded by calculations that had ceased to have any meaning.

They rang again at nine o’clock, while he and Chaya were having breakfast. The same voice, devoid of all feeling. Somehow it made it harder that it was a woman.

“Have you had enough time to think it over?”

“Listen.” His voice was trembling. “You’re making a mistake. I don’t have that sort of money. I’ve never had anything like it. You must be confusing me with someone else.”

“We don’t make mistakes. We know what you are worth.”

“That’s impossible. You can speak to my accountant, my bank manager, anyone you like. They’ll show you. Even if I sell everything, I still won’t have enough. We have to negotiate.”

The woman’s voice lost its equanimity.

“You disgust me,” she snapped. “Your son’s life is at risk and all you can think of is a scheme to save your filthy money. You should be ashamed.”

She hung up. He sat listening to the burring on the line, unable to move. Chaya came across and took the receiver from him. Gently she unfolded his left hand.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

He had been clutching his hand so tightly around the receiver that the nails had dug into the palm and drawn blood. He pulled Chaya to him and held her like a shield against his thoughts. She made no effort to comfort him. Inside, she was dull and empty. Nothing mattered any longer. Maria watched them in silence, powerless to help. No one asked her about the pain she felt at the boy’s loss. She was only the housekeeper.

They rang again that night. A man this time, a foreigner, his accent difficult to place. He spoke in grammatically correct, slightly stilted Italian with the voice of someone in his late fifties or older.

“Mr. Levin,” the man began, his voice soft and reasonable yet unemotional, unhurried, and precise, “my name is Bianco. I have been asked to speak to you in order to resolve the dilemma in which you find yourself. I would like you to consider me as a friend. I want to help you, and to help your son.”

There was a pause, a whistling as if of wind on the wire. Aryeh wondered where they were, how far they had taken Yoel. The usual place was the mountains, the Gennargentu region. They would never find the boy there among thousands of caves and underground hideouts. The man’s voice returned.

“Let me tell you that Yoel is in considerable danger. I think it is best you know that. We will get nowhere if you are cushioned from the truth. The people holding him are not noted for their tenderness. If they do not get what they want soon, they will hurt him. Make no mistake about that, they will hurt him badly. And if they decide that you either cannot or will not pay, they will kill him. This is not a game; it is a most serious thing for such a small boy to face such a fate. He is already terrified, believe me. I have seen him. Even if all goes well, I fear he may not recover easily from the mental stress.”

Aryeh listened with mounting pain and anger, fighting to control his emotions, knowing he had to pay attention for Yoel’s sake. The stranger’s matter-of-fact manner was, if anything, more hateful than the woman’s coldness, as if something more than business lay beneath the surface. And Aryeh knew that Yoel would not be the only one to come out of this scarred, that a life of wounds lay ahead for all of them, whatever the outcome.

“Mr. Levin,” the voice continued, still sweet and fragrant with reason, “I say all this not to frighten you, but in order to help you understand just how delicate your position is, and how precarious the well-being of your son. You say you do not have the necessary funds to meet the demands of Yoel’s kidnappers, and for my part I am inclined to believe you. Not all Jews are rich, whatever some people think.

“However, I have to tell you that the people holding Yoel do not believe you. They say they have done their research, that you have ample resources, and that you are just holding out on them. You are, I think, in very bad trouble, and your son’s life may be the price you pay for not being rich enough.”

The stranger paused again. His silence strangled Aryeh’s heart. Where was all this leading? Was there further cruelty to follow?

“So,” the man continued, “I have come up with a solution to your problems. I am willing to pay the sum demanded by the kidnappers in return for something else that I know you possess, something which is of no value whatever to them, but which means a very great deal to me.”

Aryeh’s head was spinning. Who was this man? What could he possibly want from Aryeh that was worth four thousand million lire? Aryeh’s share in the hotel? A cut of his future earnings?

“You’re not making sense,” he said. “I have nothing worth that much.”

“On the contrary, you will find that what I have to say will make perfect sense. Do you want me to continue?”

Aryeh was still trying to place the speaker’s accent. Something told him it might provide a clue to whatever lay behind all this. His own unfamiliarity both with the variety of Italian dialects and the ways the language was spoken by other nationalities reduced him to guesswork. All the same, he did notice some degree of similarity between the man’s accent and that of one of his colleagues, a native of Bolzano in the Alto Adige region of Italy’s northeast, bordering Austria. And he remembered once being told that German was more widely spoken there than Italian.

“Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”

“What I want is very simple. It consists of two things. The first is a guarantee of silence. You will say nothing to anyone of our agreement. Not to the police, not the carabinieri. Above all, nothing to those of your friends who might seek to interfere with my plans. The second is just as straightforward: information. Perhaps you have already guessed. I want to know the present whereabouts of the bottegaio.”

Aryeh felt as though a thick hand had torn half his stomach from him. They were playing games with him, torturing him for no good reason.

“Bottegaio?” he said. “The shopkeeper? I don’t understand.”

“On the contrary, you understand only too well. Think about it–your son’s life for the shopkeeper. Or, put it another way, the shopkeeper for four thousand million lire and the life of your son.”

Aryeh’s hand was shaking. This was worse than a nightmare.

“Please, I really do not understand. Who is the shopkeeper?”

There was a dull click as the line went dead. Aryeh remained standing, the receiver dead in his hand, sticky with sweat and fear. He stood like that for what seemed an age, not knowing what to do, where to turn, like an actor in a film when the projector has jammed, frozen in mid-action, unable to complete even the simple act of replacing a telephone receiver.

Chaya appeared beside him without a sound. She took the receiver from him and set it back on the phone.

“What did they want?” she asked. She could sense his fear; it belonged to