Read Love and Treasure for Free Online

white letters painted on one of the boxcars: MÁV HUNGARIA .
    “Are you Hungarian?” he asked.
    “Yes,” she said. “From Nagyvárad. In Transylvania.”
    One of the Hungarians called out something.
    The woman’s face softened for a moment, but then she seemed to marshal her anger and spat out a sentence whose tone of vituperation was unmistakable. The young Hungarian flushed and turned away, dragging self-consciously on his cigarette.
    “Back to work,” Jack said again. He lifted his hand to his sidearm. “Now.” The Hungarians turned back to the boxcars, making their usual show of great effort. He asked the woman, “What did he say to you?”
    “He says he is also from Nagyvárad.”
    “And what did you say to him?”
    She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head, sizing Jack up. In a tone brittle but bright, even cheerful, she said, “I ask him did he guard the ghetto there, maybe he helped my grandmother onto the train for her trip to Auschwitz.”
    Before he could stop himself, Jack laughed. There was nothing funny about what she had said; it was the audacity of this woman. She was no ruined wraith. She was allwire and sparks. As he covered his mouth in shame at his outburst, her eyes widened, and then she laughed, too. Darkly, bitterly, a laugh almost—but not completely—wrung free of joy.
    “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean … it’s just—his face. You shut him up good.”
    “Time for him to shut up, I think,” she said. “Time for them all to shutup. Now, this Hungarian train here. There are people on this Hungarian train or only soldiers?”
    “It’s a cargo train. There were some people on it, but not the kind of people you’re looking for.”
    “You know what kind of people I am looking for?”
    He did not normally blush. It was rare that he embarrassed himself, and around women he tended to be remote rather than tongue-tied. But something about this woman made him feel like an awkward child with an ungovernable mouth. It was curious, since she was much younger than he had initially assumed—perhaps no older than himself.
    “I mean there are no Jews.”
    “You think I am looking for Jews?”
    She let him hang there, flustered, trying to figure her. It was true that all kinds of people had gone to the camps: homosexuals, Communists, prostitutes. But the woman had mentioned her grandmother. In the awkward silence Jack became conscious of the gazes of his men upon him. They had to be surprised to see their cool and unflappable CO looking so decidedly flapped.
    “Excuse me,” he told her. He turned to his men and gestured with a thumb toward the Hungarians. “Sully, take the truck and three of these bozos on over to the warehouse. Get unloaded and then get back here, fast. The rest of you: patrol. You remember how to do that, right?”
    Steadied, now, Jack turned back to the woman.
    “This is a secure area, miss,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t let you stay here.”
    “Yes,” she said, without moving. She watched as two of the Hungarians kicked a long roll of carpet out of one of the boxcars like lumberjacks rolling a felled log, then struggled to lift it onto their shoulders.
    “So,” she said. “No Jews. Only carpets.”
    “Miss, you cannot stay here,” Jack said. “I’m sure you must have somewhere you’re supposed to be.”
    “I have a pass,” the woman said, reaching into the pocket of her skirt. She thrust a scrap of thin blue paper covered in smeared ink at him. “I stay at the Hotel Europa, but today I have a pass. You see?”
    “That’s fine, I don’t need to see it.”
    When he had first arrived in Salzburg, Jack had done a week of guard duty at one of the DP camps. The inmates there were mostly forced laborers awaiting repatriation back to their native countries in the East,who must have felt as though they had changed one warden for another, a hair more lenient, more generous, but still armed. None of the American guards had any MP