Love and Treasure by Ayelet Waldman Read Free Book Online

the apartment and saw a couple kissing. They were standing, the woman leaning against a wall, her face turned to the door, the man’s hands planted on either side of her head. She opened her eyes just as Jack looked in. She stared at him, impassive. He turned quickly away.
    Maria stopped in front of the last apartment on the floor, poked her head through the open doorway, and immediately she began yelling in some Slavic language.
    “Fucking DPs,” the older of the two GIs muttered.
    “Hey, Lieutenant,” the other one said in a thick Southern accent. “You speak the lingo? Think you can figure out what the hell’s going on here?”
    “Not my job, Private,” Jack said, but now Maria had switched to broken German, and he was curious to find out just whom she was threatening to throw down the stairs.
    He pushed into the room and found her towering over what he took, at first, for an elderly man, hunched at the waist, propped up by crutches fashioned from two lengths of broken board. The man’s body shook with the effort of staying upright. Huddled behind him were two small boys, one of them in tears.
    Jack said, “Is it the children you plan to throw down the stairs, Maria? Or the man with the canes?”
    Maria looked surprised at his German, though unembarrassed that her threats had been overheard. “They don’t get out, I throw them down all three.” Her accent was thick, her grammar terrible, but she had no trouble making herself understood.
    “This room is for this men!” Maria said, pointing to the back of the room, where Jack now noticed two men sitting at a small table, filling the air with the smoke of their cigarettes. They acknowledged his presence with barely a glance. They appeared to have been harvested from the same potato field as Maria.
    The KZler was lucky Maria was here, she told Jack. Otherwise the rightful residents might have taken the interlopers’ eviction into their own hands, and then all three would be crying, not just the little louse.
    “Louse?” Jack said.
    “It’s what she calls the children,” the man with the makeshift canessaid softly, also in German. Jack saw now that he was not elderly at all. He was hardly more than a boy himself. But his face was gray and creased, and he was missing most of his teeth.
    “Take them away!” Maria said to Jack.
    Jack kept his temper, and turned to the ruined young man. “She called you a KZler ?”
    “Buchenwald.”
    Jack asked the young man if it was true, what Maria had said about him and the boys trying to move into the room.
    “You are calling me liar?” Maria said, shouting again.
    “Silence,” Jack said, his voice soft but clear. Maria folded her arms over her chest and glared, pressing her lips into a thin white line.
    The man said, “I lived in this room with six others from Buchenwald, but when I received word, four days ago, that my nephews had been found in Vienna, I went there, to fetch them. When I returned, I found the other men who shared this room gone. These two had taken their place. I have asked for another room. The administrator says there is none to be had. He says that since there are now only these two, the room can also accommodate me and the boys. These gentlemen have other ideas.” The man struggled with his canes, trying to turn around without falling. “In any case, I am fully prepared to deny myself the pleasure of their company.” He turned to Maria. “Find me another place, and we will go.”
    Maria smiled. “You go,” she said. “The American will take care of you.” She called something out to the two men at the back.
    “Where are you from?” Jack asked Maria.
    “Ukraine,” she said.
    “And your friends? They’re from the Ukraine, too?”
    “Yes.”
    “What are you doing in Salzburg? How did you end up here?”
    Maria’s smile faded. “Forced labor,” she said.
    “Liar.” The voice, harsh and angry, came from the doorway, and Jack knew before he turned around who had