Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,8

them when she returned home. Not that she would need such piddling sums then. Just a habit of survival.

In her other hand was a briefcase, with the merchandise she was delivering. One hundred thousand dollars’ worth, though you’d never know it to look at it! On the jet, she had sat protectively next to it at first, and had reacted perhaps a little too violently when a Swiss Air stewardess politely offered to stow it under the seat in front of her.

TAXIS, and an arrow. Then other signs with the same thing. She didn’t have to consult her dictionary for that. At least she was going the right way. In spite of her exhaustion, she quickened her steps. Soon she would be rich.

These Americans and their craze for genealogy. She couldn’t understand it. Didn’t they know? They were the envy of the world. The destiny of the world was in their hands. Why try to be something or someone else from another age? Most of the world is trying to forget its past, but not these Americans. They are like children who must have something, even though it will probably make them sick.

Since the opening of Eastern Europe, the requests and the seeking tourists had poured in, a veritable flood. At the Archives, where the pace was, well, relaxed, they had years of American genealogical work piled up. And it wasn’t just those haunted Jews whose relatives had been exterminated. It was all kinds of people.

Elzbieta considered herself an intellectual of heightened sensibilities, an exponent of unpopular ideas. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she felt modern Poland was not feeling guilty enough about the annihilation of the Jews. Everyone had suffered, certainly, but the Jews, native-born and deportees from elsewhere, had been unimaginably tormented, hunted, snuffed out.

For her, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t even alive at the time, the Kielce pogrom of 1946 was a raw wound on her country’s honor. Almost all of Poland’s more than three million Jews already wiped out by the Nazis, and the pitiful remnant had to suffer pillaging and murder from their own countrymen!

At least Poland had survived, ultimately. Not so the Jews of Poland.

She always gritted her teeth whenever she heard the old ones–some in her own family–mumble that Hitler had done the country a favor; now some in her generation weren’t mumbling.

The pain of the Jews was always the fault of someone else, today and throughout history, it was said in her country: the Catholic Church or the many occupiers–the Hapsburgs, the Nazis, the czars, the communists–or even the Jews themselves for their alleged arrogance. Never the good Polish people. And there had been and were many good Poles. She had read a lot about Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center, and the Righteous Among the Nations. More Poles listed than any other nationality. Stands to reason, of course, given the sheer number of native and transported Jews. Still, there had undeniably been heroism, Poles who sheltered Jews, risking their own execution, as their own country was being devoured by wolves.

Yes, she would have been one of those heroes, she told herself, navigating the airport throng.

Let them hate. She was just one woman, who had grown tired of admonishing self-serving consciences. Anyway, the dead Jews were beyond harm, and there were hardly any live ones left in Poland.

Somewhere in this complex of moral indignation and weariness lay her reasons for stealing the documents she carried. To make amends, somehow, in her private way; to give back, even if by proxy, some of the past to those who had lost so much of it.

And why shouldn’t she be paid for her effort and risk? Paid well.

Only she, the Deputy Director, and the Librarian spoke English with any fluency. By chance, Elzbieta had taken the phone call that winter afternoon. It was a woman on the other side of the Atlantic, an American. A rich American from New Orleans, who wanted very specific genealogical information on her Jewish ancestors in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Poland. “Information” wasn’t exactly the correct word. She wanted the real thing, the actual documents. She wanted them removed, stolen, and sent to her. Anything dealing with the surname Balazar.

Elzbieta didn’t tell anyone. The enterprising budding capitalist that she was, she took it on herself to make the deal–$10,000 the woman offered–a sum that quickened Elzbieta’s pulse.

She found everything requested and more. She even had to do some traveling, paying out her own money, which she would definitely mention.