Beyond the Shadow of Night(80)

Damn! He laughed to himself, because there was no point getting angry. Someone had beaten him to it. There was no New York Times. He stalked up and down, peering over people’s shoulders to find the guilty party.

But that person had clearly taken their guilt home—along with the goddamn New York Times.

Why did people steal newspapers? This was a public library. As in, for the public.

He sighed quietly and returned to the rack of papers. Three hours to kill. But that was always the life of the penniless.

He took a minute to peruse the various newspapers and the magazines about computers and music and . . .

The Detroit News. He hadn’t read that in a while. That would do. But then something else caught his eye. It was the Detroit Jewish News. Even longer since he’d read that one. And quite a while since he’d thought of himself as Jewish.

For a second, Asher was a young boy again, his playground the expansive Ukrainian prairies, with seas of shimmering wheat dotted with whitewashed farmhouses. But that was so long ago it felt like three or four lifetimes had passed rather than merely one. Back then, in the 1930s, he didn’t even speak English. He’d spoken Yiddish half the time, Russian half the time, and Ukrainian half the time.

Ha!

Well, it was funny in the 1930s.

He sat down with the Detroit Jewish News—the warm-up read.

Hell, he was out of touch. It had been a while. Some plans for a new synagogue. An interview with some young pop star.

He turned another page. Some politician on the receiving end of anti-Semitic slurs. Nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

Then another page. There he stopped. In a second, his mouth turned dry, his face burned, and his hairs bristled. He gulped and almost stopped breathing, then tilted the page toward the light.

The brightness perfectly complemented the expression of the man in the photograph. He looked scared, clearly flinching at the shock of the flash.

Asher stared at the photograph for five minutes. It was a long time to stare at one image, but then again, it had been a long time.

And the name. The name was . . .

A minute later, the newspaper was folded up inside Asher’s coat and he was casually walking past the counter, smiling and nodding politely as he headed for the door.

When the fresh air hit him he almost collapsed with fear. He’d always been a good boy. He’d never stolen anything in his life. Not until now.

He passed the park, walked up to his house, unlocked the padlock around the frame of his front door, and he was inside. Sanctuary. Today the Catholic Club would have to cope without him. That felt a worse crime than stealing the newspaper.

He hurriedly put his reading glasses back on, sat down at the kitchen table, and unfolded the newspaper. He flattened it against the tabletop and looked at the photograph again. It was still the same picture, but now he was on home turf his mind was working a little better. Now he could read and think properly.

He read the article until it quoted the name—the same name that was in the caption. It said the man was Michael Peterson. Except it didn’t say it was Michael Peterson, it said it was “Michael Peterson, who was interviewed Monday regarding historic war crimes.”

“Michael Peterson,” Asher said to the cold potato soup. “Michael Peterson . . . Mykhail Petrenko.”

He read the article all the way to the bottom three times, then stared at the photo. The face in general was vaguely familiar, but there was one huge pull for Asher, a feature he could hardly drag his attention away from. It meant there could be no mistake. Under the man’s left eye there was a distinctive vertical scar, cutting the bag under that eye in half.

“Pittsburgh,” he muttered. “Hmm . . .”

It took no more than a few minutes to decide.

He grabbed a paring knife, went up to the bedroom, and pulled the linen closet away from the wall. He shoved the knife between two floorboards so one section popped out.

Then the old candy tin was in his hands.

It was hardly worthy of the words life savings, but it was all he had. And what else was he going to spend it on—more potatoes? No, it wasn’t much, but it would certainly run to a bus ticket and a night or two in Pittsburgh.

He’d seen it in the movies. If he went there, any phone booth would have a local directory. And how many people called Michael Peterson could there be in Pittsburgh?

He left the house, grabbed a plain chicken sandwich for his journey, and headed for the bus depot.



It was a long journey, and as the daylight fell away, his mind wandered to a better world—a simpler world of farms and horses and harvests and fishing in the local river. And it was a better world. Perhaps they had little food, but they had enough. They had so little, yet they had so much. And life was so much simpler then, before . . .

He shivered at his next thought, of a perverted world where blitzkrieg, genocide, and the industry of human extermination were the norm.

He switched the light on above him and adjusted it to point directly at his face. That would keep him awake.

By the time he got to Pittsburgh, Asher was fit for nothing except checking into a cheap hotel and going to bed.



The next morning, after a quick breakfast, Asher asked for the telephone directory. That made much more sense than hanging around phone booths. He returned to his room and looked up every M. Peterson in the book.

The newspaper report said this Mr. Peterson was a resident of Pittsburgh city, not the larger metro area. That whittled it down to fourteen of them. But six were female and one was down as Martyn.