Deadly Pedigree

2



This was crazy, really crazy. She knew it was. What a chance she had taken! It was all highly illegal.

But the money! There was the power that had fortified Elzbieta throughout the seemingly interminable train and plane rides.

She worked at the District State Archive in Poznan, Poland. Her long journey had taken her to Zurich, to New York, and finally here, to the New Orleans airport.

Hunger pangs pulled at her stomach. She forced herself to stay away from all the tantalizing aromas wafting from the restaurants that seemed to fill every niche. There would be time for such things, later.

She had encountered no delays in customs in New York, but she did witness a drug bust in the line next to hers. Some very nervous young men were apparently trying to smuggle heroin into the country in condoms they’d swallowed. She had figured out what was happening from the odd word overheard and understood and from the desperate pantomime of the situation.

Elzbieta knew this trip would be the most momentous event of her life; she tried to memorize every detail of her journey.

What a day! What a wide, astounding world it was! What a lot of money this strange errand of hers would bring. A hundred thousand American dollars! It was almost unbelievable that she had found the courage to make the additional demand. The future belonged to the bold in the new Poland; and, in truth, she had done worse things during the nightmare years. Now, she would be able to take her son for the operation in Germany; she could buy new clothes; some jewelry; she could maybe even get a car, one of the fine new ones from the West, not the smoke-belching Eastern Bloc jalopies she recalled from her childhood.

Some new glasses. Yes, she would buy them here, before she went home. A small indulgence, but she deserved it.

The richness of the rest of the world had shocked Elzbieta anew twenty-four hours ago; but now she was just plain numb from exhaustion and sensory overload. Though she was only an assistant librarian at the Archives, she had already seen something of the world. She’d attended a small religious college in Virginia on an American Baptist scholarship just after the Berlin Wall went down and communism imploded. She had not actually been interested in being a Baptist, but even a short Western education was worth the two-year charade of faith for the benefit of those earnest Americans. Especially an education that gave her knowledge of English. A very peculiar, difficult language, but a definite asset that got attention. Elzbieta went after what she wanted.

But in the hubbub of the moment, she realized her English wasn’t as good as she’d believed. She struggled with the direction signs. Announcements from speakers distracted her; she couldn’t help trying to figure out what the rapid-fire words meant.

Concentrate, concentrate! she berated herself silently. She was looking for the taxi area, where someone would be waiting for her with a sign with her name on it.

Everybody except her seemed to know where to go. Would her contact wait? This was like a spy novel, more fun to read than to enact.

Lugging her one small taped-together suitcase she struggled through crowds of people. The suitcase contained most of her meager worldly belongings–a few precious bootleg cosmetics, grooming items, two changes of underwear, one blouse, one pair of old, mended, but genuine Levis, which she coveted from her college years and could still fit into, almost without painful pinching. In Zurich, using a good deal of her advance money–$5000–she’d loaded up on over-the-counter medicines she’d never heard of; she could sell 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. Soon, she sprang her daring counteroffer–$100,000. It was her big chance to change her life, perhaps even to leave dreary Poland for good. The price had gone up, dramatically, but Elzbieta would assure the safe arrival of the documents by carrying them personally. Otherwise, who knew what would happen to them? She had worked it all out: her vacation month was coming up. Several phone calls followed. Finally, her veiled threat worked. Surprising the dickens out of Elzbieta, the woman agreed, though not without a certain coldness that characterized their final transatlantic conversation.

Funny thing…she would never give her name, this woman. Just a phone number. Perhaps these weren’t even her people, these Balazars. Maybe she was only a secretary, didn’t want to get involved further than giving telephoned instructions. Elzbieta didn’t care. She just wanted that money.

So many signs, so many unfamiliar names and words.

There! There was her ride: two men standing next to a big car. One man held a piece of cardboard, but she couldn’t quite catch the name on it. The man scanned passing pedestrians, showing his sign quickly only to certain young women, as if it were a dirty photograph.

Her relief turned to wariness. Both men seemed impatient, angry for some reason. Was she the cause of their annoyance? She recalled the nervous young men in the Customs line; each second of delay could have cost them their lives. Everything seemed to be faster over here in America, passing minutes grabbed ravenously. She hoped these men would not be mean to her. Maybe she was later than she thought. What time was it at home? Had she set her watch back too far, failing to account for Daylight Saving Time? She would have to ask them, apologize if so.

These men…she held back. Both of them were big, muscular, handsome, in fact. Good teeth. One was blond, the other was darker, vaguely Siberian looking. Then she remembered there was a lot of aboriginal stock in the population, here in the South. What did they call them–Indians? How can all these people live together in peace? she wondered. Europeans can’t seem to do it. Since New York, black people, especially, had fascinated her. She had seen a few in Virginia, on campus and in town, of course, but now she really noticed them in all their variety of colors and facial constructions and raven hair. What a wonderful country!

But these men scared her. Their eyes were cruel, hunter’s eyes. She remembered that look in the eyes of the worst of Jaruzelski’s security forces, in December of 1981 when martial law was declared. Recently, she had seen the look in the eyes of Russian and Ukranian gangsters in newspapers and magazines and on television. Such eyes looked on horrible things and did not blink.

“My name is Elzbieta,” she said. “You are here for me?”

“Yeah, babe, we’re here for you,” the fair-haired one said, a troubling leer on his face.

He tried to take her briefcase, but she clutched it to her.

“Suit yourself. Get in.” She heard him say something to his darker friend, and she thought it ended with “dumb Polack bitch.”

Surely she had misunderstood.

The car amazed her. The president of Poland himself, the great Walesa, probably didn’t have a car this big or nice. All this comfort, this complexity. It was almost as big as some apartments she’d lived in back home.

She was embarrassed. She knew she did not smell all that great; it was so warm here, and she had been sweating in the heat. She checked her breath. She began to worry about her jaw-length light-brown hair–a disgrace, stiff and lusterless; she had tucked it behind her ears because it refused to do anything else. A bath, a long, luxurious bath in a clean American hotel room! That’s what she most wanted right now. She should be living like a queen, she was going to be so rich!

The dark-featured man drove very fast. He ran red lights. Neither of the two men spoke. They stared straight ahead as the engine roared.

Elzbieta had a guidebook with a foldout map. She prided herself on her map-reading skills. The car was going in the wrong direction. She was certain her reservations were at a hotel downtown.

“We should go that way?” she said, pointing over her shoulder.

No answer. The blond one turned up the radio. Spunky jazz. Elzbieta would have enjoyed it in other circumstances.

“You are mistaking,” she said. Fear made her chin quiver. “I am staying in hotel downtown. That way. Here are my papers.” She held up her hotel confirmation for the blond man to see. He didn’t turn around.

As she looked back in the direction of downtown New Orleans, through the heavily tinted rear window, she understood that there was indeed a mistake, a terrible one. And she had made it.

Elzbieta frantically yanked the door handles. Both doors were locked solid from the front.

Praying to the Holy Family and John Paul II, she cried quietly.





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