in the back?”
He handed her a mug of hot coffee then sat back down on the desk with a mug of his own. His darkly greying hair rose in a delicate wave from his high forehead. “I was not, I think, meant to be a fishmonger.”
“How did your collection start?”
He adjusted himself on the edge of the desk. “I like to think that it chose me rather than the other way around. You see, without wanting to, I benefited from the misfortune of others. These treasures were given to me in gratitude by the wealthy Jews who owned them. For my help. They couldn’t take all their possessions with them, you understand, though I didn’t want to accept them under the circumstances. I finally did, otherwise they would’ve been lost or destroyed.”
“You’re German,” she said.
“Swiss.”
“From...?”
“One of the smaller towns not far from Zurich. You wouldn’t know it. My parents had a fish market.”
“Wasn’t Switzerland neutral during the war?”
“Ah. Well, you see I travelled often to Germany for the business. To keep in touch with our suppliers and so on. There was an apartment in Hamburg I stayed in when I was there. It belonged to Jews. I saw what was happening there. I offered my help. I had some connections because of the business. I knew people. I knew where to get a forged passport. I knew who could falsify documents so I arranged phony papers for the Jews who owned the apartment. A family with three children. They left the city and took only what they could carry. They insisted on giving me what they left behind. I never heard from them again. I don’t think they survived. But through them I met others. All the Jews were scared. I couldn’t help everyone, of course. The Gestapo would’ve caught on. But I did what I could. These people were running for their lives. They couldn’t worry about their candelabra. So, instead of leaving everything for the Nazis who inherited their apartments, they gave me tokens of their gratitude. It would have been churlish of me to refuse, don’t you think?”
“You’re not Jewish,” she said, struck by the irony that this gentile man collected Jewish artifacts while she, a Jew, had never given them a thought. His head tilted on an angle observing her; he seemed amused at her reaction.
She looked at her watch. “I’m afraid I have to go.” She stood up. “Here is my card. If I haven’t heard from you by tomorrow about your mystery man, I’m afraid I’ll have to call the police.”
His eyes fixed on her. “You will hear from me.”
She made her way back to the partition door where Max took his leave of her. She nodded politely at Mona who busied herself cleaning the counter and studiously ignored Rebecca as she headed out the front door.
She stood on the sidewalk taking deep breaths of the fresh air. Several cars pulled into the covered parking lot across the street. Near one of the pillars a man stood watching her. Grey sweat pants, sweatshirt, blue baseball cap. Beneath his visor he’d watched her emerge from the store. As if he’d been waiting for her. Was this the shadow in her office? He seemed smaller than the killer she expected. He was nervy, out in the light like this. She wasn’t going to run from him in broad daylight.
She looked him in the eye — at least into the darkness beneath the visor — and made to cross the street. Suddenly he jumped into the parking lot behind some partition or car. Gone into the tumult of the market. Some killer.
Maybe she was getting jumpy. Maybe the poor guy was just a jogger and she was getting paranoid. She wasn’t going to turn into Goldie.
chapter nineteen
Nesha watched the store with unflagging attention. He had found some steps to sit on nearby and pretended to read the paper. The barrel of the gun felt hard and bulky in the small of his back. He was dizzy with hatred, but what had he expected? The news photo was dated 1978. He’d gone into the store and recognized no one. He’d tried the adjoining store — nothing. He couldn’t just show the storekeepers the photo of the bastard. They could be friends, or relatives. They’d open their mouths and the pig would be long gone. But then, anything could’ve happened in a year. He could have retired.
Maybe he was puttering around in his garden after a respectable business career, having lived a quiet life for thirty-five years, unmolested, when he had buried so many. He had helped bury a civilization. They were all gone, Nesha’s own family was gone, and only an archaeologist could investigate the ruins. This was what he had become. A scholar fascinated by the extinct. A gravedigger sifting through rubbish heaps. The problem with such scrutiny was that it required a constant examination of the heart and that was a part of him he kept under wraps for self-preservation. Some memories, like the one of his mother’s pinched face turned and searching for him, needing to call to him yet not daring to, were wounds his heart had grown a callous over, thicker with each year till one wall of his heart was quite immobile. So that now, when he thought of her, he could touch the petrified skin instead of her face. This was the way he had intended to live out the rest of his life, a callous in his chest under his ribcage; it was the least painful way. How long could one live with a sword through the heart?
That was before he’d found the news photo. Everything changed then. All the pain suddenly crystallized into rage and, to his shock, it felt good. He felt more alive at this moment than he had for decades. Even sitting on the cement stair, he was aware of the milky April sun trying to warm the air. His blood sang through his veins.
The chill of the morning reminded him of spring in Poland, though he hadn’t thought of that for a very long time. Since last week, the discovery of the file, he could think of nothing else: visions of that frosty morning had returned with a vengeance, a swooping of the scythe that he had taken pains to forget. Sometimes he could almost make himself believe he had imagined it. The years of working in a reasonable grey office with columns of numbers that never refused him, never disappointed him, made him forget he was an orphan. A branch of a tree of Israel, only the tree had been cut down and burned to ashes. So how had the branch survived? By rooting itself in the ground of another place, somewhere the earth didn’t smell of blood. It had been the most natural of things, to forget. But in his heart, his painfully ledgered accountant’s heart, he had always known there would be a day of reckoning. It was a matter of checks and balances, credit and liability. He had played with numbers long enough to know they were the only things you could count on. Now he had to dip into the real world and hope he could find his prey without losing himself.
And what about Goldie? Justice for Goldie. Another innocent casualty. She would never see the spring. He mourned for her but from a distance; in his heart as well as literally. He could do that because he didn’t remember her. He’d been too young when they had visited each other in Poland. Goldie and Chana were already fashionable young women when he was still in short pants, maybe seven or eight. They were cousins, children of an older uncle, but he always called them aunts because of the age difference. He was glad to keep the sadness at bay. Yet the photo they published of her in the paper tugged at what was left of his heart. He recognized that pale blonde of women of a certain age. When his wife had gone blonde one day in her forties, he was surprised. To her it was a turning point, not because of the change, but because till then, he had noticed nothing about her.
“You’ve dyed your hair,” he had said that fateful day.
“I’ve been dyeing my hair for years,” she had said.
It turned out she had been dyeing her hair brown to cover the grey. It had gotten greyer and lighter until there was more light than dark, and the sensible thing to do was to go
