Hardt shook his head. “I don’t think so. In any case, we aren’t too happy about the idea of leaving him in Germany for trial, for this reason. There’s a statute of limitations in force under German law. Cases of manslaughter must be tried within fifteen years of the crime – murder, within twenty years.”

Chavasse frowned. “You mean Bormann might not even come to trial?”

Hardt shrugged. “Who knows? Anything might happen.” He got to his feet and paced restlessly across the compartment. “We are not butchers, Chavasse. We don’t intend to lead Bormann to the sacrificial stone with the whole of Jewry shouting hosannas. We want to try him for the same reason we have tried Eichmann. So that his monstrous crimes might be revealed to the world. So that people will not forget how men treat their brothers.”

His eyes sparkled with fire. He was held in the grip of a fervor that seemed almost religious, something that possessed his heart and soul so that all other things were of no importance to him.

“A dedicated man,” Chavasse said softly. “I thought they’d gone out of fashion.”

Hardt paused, one hand raised in the air, and stared at him, and then he laughed and color flooded his face. “I’m sorry, at times I get carried away. But there are worse things for a man to do than something he believes in.”

“How did you come to get mixed up in this sort of thing?” Chavasse asked.

Hardt sat down on the bunk. “My people were German Jews. Luckily, my father had the foresight in 1933 to see what was coming. He moved to England with my mother and me, and he prospered. I was never particularly religious – I don’t think I am now. It was a wild, adolescent impulse which made me leave Cambridge in 1947 and journey to Palestine by way of an illegal immigrants’ boat from Marseilles. I joined Haganah and fought in the first Arab war.”

“And that turned you into a Zionist?”