The Thief of Auschwitz by Jon Clinch

slid onto his plate. They sit side by side against the foundation of the block, on the shady side where the masonry is cooler against their backs. The day has been hot and their shirts and trousers are soaked through and this is the only pleasure to be had. This and companionship.
    “Did you get any food there?” says Max, chewing and chewing on that tough scrap of beef.
    “No,” says his father. “There’s food around, but they keep a tight rein on things. I don’t think Schuler ever really got much from Canada.”
    Max reaches into his mouth and takes out the gray knot he’s been working on. “I thought—”
    “I know what you thought,” says his father, holding up a hand. “I didn’t get anything extra, but on the other hand I haven’t worked as hard as you. I’m sure of that.”
    Max sits holding the meat between two fingers and a thumb, the knob of it like another filthy appendage and just as appetizing. “Papa—”
    “Go on. You’re a growing boy.” He takes what remains of his own bread and scrapes the plate with it, soaking up the little bit of watery runoff that arrived with the beef. “Eat up,” he says.
    Max does.
    “People die in Canada just like everywhere else. It’s no paradise in that department.” He tells Max about Wasserman and the gold piece. Wasserman and Jankowski and the gold piece and the machine gun.
    “So there’s really gold? There’s really gold?”
    Youth. It hasn’t been wrung out of him yet.
    “This fellow Wasserman,” says Jacob, shaking his head, ignoring the question. “He was a weakling. A weakling even here among us weaklings. I’d thought that such a man could get by in Canada. Look at Schuler. He may not be as pathetic a creature as Wasserman was, but he’s older by fifteen years. Maybe twenty.”
    “Schuler’s dead.”
    “Dead?” Jacob is licking the damp spots on his plate, but he leaves off. It’s only been one day that he’s had the old man’s duties. “Dead?”
    “He committed suicide.”
    “How? Where?”
    “At the excavation.” Max lowers his voice to a whisper, and his father leans in. “Slazak didn’t like the way he was digging. Schuler talked back, told him that his work was always good enough for the capo in Canada. Said that maybe Slazak should take a lesson from him instead of complaining.” Max shakes his head and swallows. “We buried him where he fell. Those nice shoes and everything.”
    Perhaps the youth has been wrung out of him after all.
     
    *
     
    Zofia is standing outside the kitchen door, fending off the two boulevardiers of the delivery commando. One of them, not the junkman of Witnica but his partner, formerly a knife-sharpener and mender of pots from a village in the Carpathians, has brought her a couple of cigarettes. “Free of charge,” he says, “no obligation on your part whatsoever.” He smiles and shows teeth that he could have sharpened in an earlier life. Tilted incisors and long canines and molars like tombstones. Certain gaps where teeth have rotted and fallen out, and certain other gaps where gold teeth have been removed with a pair of pliers. He has a cigarette of his own jutting through one of those holes, just as if he’d intended it for that purpose.
    Three cigarettes in total, then, one between his lips and two more peeking from his pocket, the Holy Trinity incarnate in pilfered tobacco. Three cigarettes, a treasure as great as Blackbeard’s, possessed by a man—this being a coal delivery day—whose skin and clothing and facial stubble are as black as that very name. Call him Blackbeard, then. Blackbeard the sharpener of knives and mender of pots.
    Zofia doesn’t fancy Blackbeard the way she fancies the junkman, but he’ll do. He has the cigarettes, after all. That helps. It more than helps. It’s everything. The junkman has never offered her anything but a smile and a flattering remark, and she knows the value of those.
    “You must want something in exchange,” she says, lifting up