Free The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch Page A

infusion of cash, too.
    Once his wife found out, I figure the two of them cooked up the whole deal together. It must have been harder on Betsy than it was on him, but what else was she supposed to do? Her husband spends ten or fifteen years making naked pictures of this Helga and hiding them in his buddy’s place down the road. His old buddy Frolic Weymouth. That’s right. Frolic. A full-grown man named after a foxhound. That tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it?
    So when Betsy finds the pictures, what’s she supposed to do? Anybody could answer that question. Lemons into lemonade. It’s the American way. She capitalizes on her own misfortune, picks up the phone, and the two of them ride their pathetic little homegrown scandal all the way down to Washington, D.C.
    The important thing is this: even though the Helga show came toward the end of Andy’s life, it wasn’t a retrospective by any means. It was just Helga. Helga and the chance for every curiosity seeker in the world to have a peek into Uncle Andy’s private little world.
    I guess they’d had their fill of Christina’s World by then. Everybody had.
    This retrospective of mine they’re mounting, though? It’s the real deal.
     
     
     
     
    Five
     
     
     
    “How shall we go on without Lydia and Max?”
    That’s the message the deliveryman carries to Jacob. He knows exactly where to find him. He knows his commando and he knows his block. There’s no reaching Jacob during the workday, though, not with the Ukrainian guards keeping an eye on things. His commando has dug their way under the road and come out the other side with only a half-dozen men lost to Slazak’s temper and the guards’ eager trigger fingers, and the road presents an additional barrier even if it’s not a physical one. The delivery commando has no obvious business over there, not with coal and definitely not with flour, and time has proven again and again, to the little junkman and to every other individual who has passed through his commando either to be reassigned elsewhere or to die of overwork or to be shot for one offense or another, that the minute you have to start explaining things it’s already too late.
    The delivery commando works long hours, though. Longer than most, impossible as it seems, for just this reason. A black market operation requires access and access requires opportunity and opportunity requires a flexible schedule. So they start work early and quit late, and they constantly adjust their route to accommodate certain ever-shifting exigencies.
    Thus they arrive at Jacob’s block when the men are done for the day. They’re done working and done with the first evening roll call—the one that happens before they get their rations, the one that sometimes goes on forever and supersedes the meal altogether—and now they’re lingering for a few precious moments in the yard. The junkman wipes his brow with the back of his wrist, adding black to black. The day is still warm and he’s wearing his coat in spite of it, for the usual reasons. Bits of coal collect in every fold of it. He tore the flaps from the outside pockets long ago to help the process along, and then he sold the fabric for a couple of cigarettes. It’s the pockets inside where he tucks whatever secret merchandise he’s transporting on any given day, although at this moment the merchandise is strictly in his mind.
    He looks around for Jacob, stretching his shoulders and taking a shovel from the wagon. His partner draws the horse nearer to the building and the junkman lets down the gate and they begin scraping coal into the bin. They’re in no hurry. There’s not a capo to be seen, no authority figures at all except for the guards scattered around the perimeter of the yard with their machine guns and their flat looks and their eyes like coin slots.
    The junkman spies Jacob squatting in the dirt alongside the building, his head bent in conversation with a younger man. A boy almost, a