Love and Treasure Read Free Page B

lengths of their jumps with pebbles and bickering over who had leaped farther. They spoke a language unknown to Jack, but he assumed, based on what Rigsdale had told him, that it was Hungarian.
    “Come on, Wiseman,” Rigsdale called over his shoulder. “You’re supposed to be fluent in gibberish.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Jack climbed down from the jeep and followed Rigsdale toward the train. He had never worked for this particular captain before, but by now he was used to receiving sudden assignments to the command of senior officers tasked with undertaking excursions into obscure and doubtful backwaters of the Occupied Zone. Jack had a gift for topography and a photographic memory for maps. He had a feel for landscape and a true inner compass, and in his imagination the most cursory and vague of descriptions, a two-dimensional scrawl on a scrap of paper, took on depth and accuracy. This aptitude, which in civilian life had meant little more than always knowing whether he was facing uptown or downtown when he came up out of the subway, had found its perfect application in the war. Even during the confusion of battle, command had always been ableto rely on Wiseman’s company to be where it was supposed to be and, even more important, to be moving in the right direction, something not always true of the rest of the division. This spatial acuity, along with his fluency in German, French, Italian, and (less usefully) Latin and ancient Greek, kept him in demand with the brass, who contended among themselves to have him attached to their commands.
    “What’re they saying?” Rigsdale said.
    “I don’t know, sir.”
    “Well, figure it out, goddamn it.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    One of the enemy soldiers ducked back into the passenger car from which the boys were leaping. Jack lifted his rifle. A moment later, a portly little man in a gray suit, complete with vest and watch fob, emerged from the same carriage and stepped down, wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, still chewing a mouthful of something. Like the guards, he had tied a scrap of white fabric around his upper arm.
    The man hurried over to the half-dozen American soldiers standing by their two jeeps, his expression at once servile and calculating, as if they were potential customers of undetermined means. He extended his hand to shake Captain Rigsdale’s, seemed to think the better of it, and instead gave him a crisp, theatrical salute.
    Rigsdale kept his own hands tucked by the thumbs into the webbed belt at his hips.
    “Captain John F. Rigsdale, U.S. Army, Forty-Second Division. You the conductor of this choo-choo?”
    The man shook his head, frowning. “No English. Deutsch? Français?”
    “Go ahead, Lieutenant,” Rigsdale said, motioning Jack forward.
    “Deutsch,” Jack said.
    The man’s German was fluent, although the Hungarian accent made the language sound softer, mellifluous, the r ’s rolled on the tongue rather than the back of the throat, the emphasis placed on the beginning of the words. Jack’s accent had its own peculiarities. Beneath the elegant High German cultivated by the Berliner refugee who had taught his German classes at Columbia University, Jack spoke with a touch of the Galicianer Yiddish of his maternal grandparents. His father’s parents, ofauthentic German Jewish stock, had never to his knowledge uttered a word in that language.
    “His name is Avar László,” Jack told Rigsdale. “He’s in charge of the train.”
    “Ask him if he’s a military officer, and if so why he’s not in uniform.”
    He was, Avar said, a civil servant, the former mayor of the town of Zenta, currently working for something he called the Property Office.
    “Ask Mr. László why the hell his men haven’t turned their arms over to the U.S. government,” Rigsdale said.
    “Avar,” the Hungarian said in German. “My surname is Avar. Dr. Avar. László is my first name.”
    Jack asked Dr. Avar if he was aware that the terms of surrender required that enemy