Free Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman Page A

what might have been tenderness or pity.
    He came around from behind the desk and took her hands in his.
    “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “Come on in. I can probably manage a cup of tea.”
    “Tea would be nice.”
    She looked around her for a place to sit, and Jack quickly steered her outside to where his men had set up a tiny field kitchen with a Coleman pocket stove and a cache of tea bags, powdered coffee, and milk. He pulled an overturned bucket up to the stove, cleaned it of dust, and offered it to her. Private Willie Streeter, a sweet-tempered New Yorker who was Jack’s favorite by far of the men under his command, offered to prepare the tea, but Jack insisted on doing it himself. When the water had boiled, he put a tea bag and a dollop of sweetened condensed milk into a metal mug and handed it to Ilona.
    “Thank you,” she said. “It was so crowded in the Europa, I couldn’t be there no more.”
    “Anymore.”
    “Anymore. I thought I would come to meet you here, instead of waiting for you to pick me up. I hope it’s all right.”
    They had a date; they were—though it was a New York verb, an activity too dumb and innocent and tinged with swing music to apply to anything Ilona Jakab could or would ever consent to engage in—dating. David Ball had gotten them tickets to the first night’s performance of the reopened Salzburg Festival. Neither Jack nor Ilona took much interest in Mozart, but it was a tough ticket to get. Only a very few Salzburgers would be in attendance, and no DPs at all, beyond the musicians drafted to replace those subject to the denazification laws.
    “It’s fine,” Jack said. “I’m glad you came. I know you’ve been curious about this place.”
    “Curious,” she said, quoting him back to himself, not quite ready to agree to the description. Given all that she had been through, it did not surprise him in the least that she chose to maintain or simply could not help feeling a distance between them, a gap of experience that no amount of physical closeness, intimate talk, or mutual affection could bridge. But he was and remained surprised to find that she should most often manifest this distance in the form of irony, teasing, a tinge of mockery in all her replies. She carried the cup of tea back inside the arcing shadows of the warehouse. He followed.
    “Curiouser and curiouser,” she said. But her eyes as she took in the stacked boxes, crates, and pallets were not detached or ironic. They were huge in the darkness, avid and sad. “Everything is from the one train, the day I met you?”
    “Almost everything,” he said.
    “Silverware.”
    “Lot of that.”
    “Jewelry?”
    “Yes.”
    “Paintings, statues.”
    “Some.”
    “What else?”
    “All kinds of personal property. Furs. Housewares. Gold.”
    “Furniture?”
    He felt her guessing, blindly, at the shame in his heart.
    “Every kind of thing somebody might want to take or hold on to,” he said.
    “It’s like a treasure train.”
    “I guess you might say that,” he said. Apart from the relatively small quantity of gold bullion and gems handed over by Avar, there did not appear to be all that many items of great value on the train—no Leonardos, no trunks spilling over with diamonds—but the sheer quantity of the loot was overwhelming, and in the aggregate its value must be considerable. A single gold-filled watch was perhaps not worth more than fifty or sixty dollars, but if you multiplied that watch by a thousand or ten thousand?
    “And it all came from Hungary?”
    “The man who turned the train over to us was a Hungarian named László Avar. He told us that he worked for the Jewish Property Office.”
    “The Jewish Property Office,” she repeated, and this time there was no hint of mockery or teasing. She murmured a few words in Hungarian, then said, “Yes. I know them.”
    “What I don’t understand,” he said, “is how this stuff came to be on this train in the first place. Avar said his