Free The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch

nonetheless. “Go ahead and give me a shave,” he says, indicating the jug of hot water and drawing a hand across his chin.
    Jacob shaves him carefully and well, for Eidel and for Max.
    Moments later he’s outside again, shading his eyes from the bright sun, beginning the long walk back to the excavation. All alone out here he feels vulnerable and exposed—there’s no pack of men to work his way into the middle of, and no protection from whatever brutality some stranger may choose to inflict upon him—but the truth is that no one notices him at all. Not the prisoners standing in one of the yards enduring a roll call that began sometime the night before. Not the capo in charge of those men and not the guards. Not the SS officer who careens past on a motorcycle and not the two wasted prisoners standing like supplicants outside the door of the hospital. He may as well be invisible. He wonders if it will always be this way, should he get the job and be permitted to come and go alone. If he will always be beneath notice.
    He’s thought all along that exposure would be the worst thing, safety in numbers and so forth, but now he’s not so certain. As long as he keeps moving, and as long as he stays clear of the fence, he seems entirely safe. To test this idea he turns down a passageway between two blocks, not knowing where he’s headed, and wanders freely for a while. Turning one way and then another at intersections between the buildings, moving steadily, looking purposeful. Nothing happens. He emerges into the clear and turns again, this time back in the direction of the main gate instead of toward the excavation, and once more no one notices. Not a pair of guards smoking alongside the fence, not a woman looking down from a high window overhead, not a group of prisoners queued up in front of the block waiting for something.
    All of this walking takes energy. He’s getting tired, and he realizes that he ought to save his strength for the dig. A commando of prisoners passes by at double time, raising dust with their torn boots and their bare feet, and under the cover of their passing he turns back.
    He looks down at the tattoo on his arm as he goes and he thinks of the ledgers where such things are recorded. He thinks of Drexler and his Totenbuch. The sergeant was talking on the phone to someone higher up—Vollmer, perhaps, or even the commandant himself—about the entries filling that infernal volume. Bronchitis. Inflammations of the kidneys. Heart attack after heart attack.
    More diagnoses were required, he said, a greater variety.
    Jacob stumbles and nearly falls but catches himself at the last second. A misstep will draw attention. A misstep will destroy his anonymity. So he takes a deep breath and keeps on, understanding at last that he of all people has just seen the end of the Totenbuch. It has been a compilation of lies all along—how many prisoners can die of heart attacks in a single day? in a single hour?—and the Nazis won’t be bothered to keep it up anymore.
    Anonymity indeed. When men and women die from now on, their names and numbers won’t even go on the record.
    He steadies himself and picks up the pace ever so slightly. Not enough to be noticed, but enough. He must get back to the excavation. He must return to his son.
     
     
     
     
    Max
     
    This retrospective certainly wasn’t my idea.
    They could have waited and done it without me. After all, I’m pushing ninety or thereabouts, depending on who you ask. But no. The National Gallery is the National Gallery and they do what they want to do when they want to do it. They don’t ask you what you think.
    A person can’t help being flattered, though. At least a little.
    Wyeth had to put himself through all of that Helga business to get his day at the National Gallery. I mean it. Don’t think he wasn’t fishing for the attention, for the Time cover and the Newsweek cover and all the rest of it, one last hurrah in his declining years. A nice