Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,34

beautiful women and the south of France. He could buy enough fine wine to float in, purchase whole junkshops whenever he pleased, research and write to his heart’s content…for a while, anyway.

Natalie Armiger’s face was a portrait of conquest; she might have just triumphed in a successful hostile corporate raid.

It was dusk before Nick realized how many times around the Audubon Park track he must have jogged. He had been trying to run away from the death camps tattooed on Corban’s soul, from the fiendish Nazi doctors, from the Queen of Artemis Holdings, from Balazar, Hiram and Hyam–but most of all, from his shame.

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8

Saturday afternoon Nick was finally able to summon the courage to call Corban, to break the news that their deal was off.

On the phone, Corban threatened, pleaded, and bribed. It seemed to Nick that discrediting Armiger had become the only thing in Corban’s life of misery. Did he even care any longer for the money he’d lost? Nick was no psychiatrist, but he sensed that somehow, in the old man’s crumbling mind, Armiger had come to represent all of the relentless terror he had seen striding across Europe, casting its deadly shadow on his life.

She might be an unpleasant woman who used questionable means, but did she deserve such harassment? Maybe Armiger was right after all: the old guy just might be bonkers.

For all his skillful rationalization, Nick couldn’t fight the feeling that he had become a genealogical gigolo, a mind and a conscience for hire to the highest bidder.

“I have something for you,” Corban said on the phone. “There is more that you must tell the world. I am too ill to come downtown…yes, yes, I lied to you! Big deal. What is my lie next to hers? A flea!”

Nick tried to interrupt with Armiger’s side of the story. But the old man became even more agitated and cut him off with a volley of impenetrable Yiddishisms that didn’t fail to express vehement disdain for Nick, Armiger, the world in general.

“God forbid she should be one of us! But once upon a time, yes, there was a landsman in her family. Oh, I could hurt her real bad with that.” He whispered confidentially: “Her rich goys, they hate Jews. But that’s not the whole schmeer. I got something better to fight with. I show you what I mean. You don’t understand. She has got to be stopped, before she does more evil! She is one of them, with blood on her hands. Come! I have no one else, except the yentes from the community center. You must come!”

Nick’s kind heart–and his curiosity–got the best of him. He agreed to see Max Corban the next morning.

That afternoon, though, as he worked alone at his office, he began to feel less sorry for Corban. Wasn’t it the old man’s fault that he had become involved in this mess?

From now on, he decided, no more weirdos for clients.

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9

Max Corban wept over the scrapbook, as he had done so often.

Darkness still cloaked the morning outside. Lately, sleep had become more difficult for him. The aches and pains of his damaged life tormented him. But worse: each night he awoke terrified, exhausted, lost. The body could be dealt with; but the mind…he had seen many people go mad in the concentration camps; they were the lucky ones, remaining unaware of the inevitable, ultimate horrors to come. He knew what his mental turmoil meant. It was how the final madness starts.

He had put water on to boil, in the kitchen of his little house. His life now was no more than a teaspoon of instant coffee, sere and bitter. Only another scalding inundation could offer peace, dissolution into a puff of smoke, the peace of death.

It was their fault fifty years ago. Her fault today. No difference.

The scrapbook on his kitchen table held the story of his return from the grave. Liberating soldiers had snapped photos of the stick figures that had once been human beings. Corban moved his fingers over the image of one such figure in a pitiful crowd, as if feeling the bones beneath the stretched skin. It was he himself. Even now, when he looked in the mirror, that is what he saw staring blankly back at him, below the flesh.

He turned pages. There were happier pictures of the years after the war. Of other survivors, new friends, and his future wife; of relief workers and Allied soldiers who had taken a fancy to him; of simple pleasures