Free Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman

there, in charge of the contents of the train. Jack’s latest CO, Lieutenant Colonel Clancy K. Price, had ordered him to complete a preliminary inventory and reorganize the property. The unloading and cataloging of the contents of the train required that Jack spend ten hours a day hunched on a stool over a desk fashioned from a door and two sawhorses. Pain radiated from his shoulder to his neck. It forked like lightning down to the small of his back. He needed a goddamn chair.
    He went by the book, through the usual channels. He approached the Rainbow Division support battalion, and when he was told they couldn’t help him, he turned to the Quartermaster Corps and from there to the engineers. It seemed to be the case that there was not a serviceable desk chair in the entire Occupied Zone. Any chair that had survived the winter without being chopped into firewood had long since been looted or commandeered by the U.S. Army Air Corps, whose postwar mission appeared to require a remarkable amount of sitting. In the meantime Jack reported every day to the warehouse and set his back on fire.
    Under his organization plan, all furniture recovered from the train was stored in section C of the warehouse, at the back, between furs and household goods. There were two hundred sixteen chairs in section C. Jack had counted every one.
    He considered a fancy ball-and-claw mahogany side chair with a torn pink silk cushion, a leather-and-aluminum wheeled desk chair thathe discovered the hard way had a sprung spring aimed at the center of his left buttock, a high-backed oak office chair that seemed too regal for the task, before settling at last on what he took for a plain kitchen chair, with black lacquer paint that would resist scratches and eighteen holes punched in the back, for ventilation, he supposed. It did not promise or indeed provide any padding or back support; it was plain, the simplest chair he could find. He figured it for the cheapest, though years later he would see the chair’s twin in a museum exhibit of the works of Josef Hoffmann, the noted furniture designer of the Vienna Secession, and realize that he couldn’t have chosen a more valuable chair if he’d tried.
    Jack sat a moment in the straight-backed chair, trying to decide whether the relief that sitting afforded exceeded the trouble it gave to his conscience. He was no saint. Like all the soldiers in the victorious armies—in victorious armies since the dawn of war—Jack had done his own share of souveniring. Rolled in a couple of towels in his duffel, back in his billet, were two Lugers, one of them engraved with an elaborate oak-leaf design. On the windowsill next to his bed stood an eight-inch-high marble bust, “liberated” from the home of a minor Nazi Party official in Anzenbach near Berchtesgaden, of Tacitus, whose Dialogus de Oratoribus had been the subject of Jack’s undergraduate thesis at Columbia. Taking the guns and the bust of Tacitus had caused him only minor pangs, but this was different. He took his responsibility as official custodian of the contents of the Werfen train seriously, and that was part of what troubled him as he carried the black lacquered chair out to his makeshift desk in the front office, sat down, and felt his shoulders unknotting. But mostly what troubled him was the thought of the murdered Hungarian Jew whose kitchen chair might be the only remaining trace of his ever having existed.
    “I’m sorry,” he said to the ghost that haunted the chair. “But my back is killing me.”
    “Even when you are alone, you apologize.”
    Jack leaped to his feet, his cheeks burning, as if caught in the midst of committing a bestial and unforgivable act.
    “You’re here,” he said, gratuitously.
    “Am I not permitted?”
    “No. I mean, yes. Well … actually, no, you aren’t supposed to be here, but it’s fine. It doesn’t matter. Nobody in this place gives a damn but me.”
    “I think that may be true,” Ilona said, with