After Dachau Read Online Free

morning” speaking Persian. He’d discovered the delight of glossolalia—speaking in tongues—long ago, while in his early teens, and had entertained friends with thetrick for years before he began to take himself seriously and wonder just what language he was speaking. It was of course no language at all, but he managed to find an expert who swore it sounded just the way he’d always imagined the ancient Persians might sound. Reading up on them, Rudolph said he began to experience a powerful sense of
déjà vu
, especially when it came to the reign of the first Darius—and the rest followed as night the day.
    Over the next three years I investigated four dozen cases as worthless as this one (and was on the verge of quitting) when at last I caught a glimpse of the gold.
    Nine-year-old Eddie Tucker of Council Bluffs, Iowa, one morning asked his mother about the time he got sick in the boardinghouse in O’Neill. She told him he must have dreamed it, because he’d never been sick in any boardinghouse anywhere. He insisted it wasn’t a dream, it was something he remembered from a long time ago. It didn’t matter how long ago it was, she said, because they’d never lived anywhere but in Council Bluffs and had never even visited a place called O’Neill. In fact, she’d never even heard of it.
    The boy gave up, but only temporarily. A few hours later he came back to say he remembered that the boardinghouse had a little fish pond in the backyard, and a boy named Perry from across the street had made him a toy boat driven by a rubber band and propeller. He drew her a picture to show her what he was talking about. Her rejoinder was, “I thought you were sick at this place.”
    “That was later,” Eddie said.
    Perry had also given him a coin he’d made himself that looked just like regular money. Eddie said he could get rich ifhe made his own money, but Perry explained that the counterfeit cost more to make than real money, which was a little over Eddie’s head at the time.
    “I don’t know where you’re getting all this stuff,” Eddie’s mother said. “This never happened.”
    “How would you know?” Eddie riposted. “You weren’t there.”
    “Where was I?”
    “I mean Perry and I were
playing
together. You weren’t out there playing with us.”
    “Was I in the house?”
    But he didn’t remember anything about that.
    A few days later Eddie told his mother he’d hidden some things behind a loose brick in the foundation of the house in O’Neill, some coins, maybe. He didn’t remember exactly what he’d put there, but he was sure he could find the brick.
    “Do you think the things are still there?” his mother asked.
    “I’ll bet they are,” he said.
    “Why didn’t you get them when we left?”
    But he didn’t know the answer to that.
    In spite of herself, Eddie’s mother had become intrigued. They got out an atlas and turned to the index for Iowa. There was an O’Brien but no O’Neill.
    “Could it have been O’Brien?” she asked.
    “No, I’m sure it was O’Neill.”
    “Well, there isn’t any O’Neill.”
    “Try Nebraska,” Eddie said—and there it was.
    Checking the map, they found it was about two hundred miles northwest of Omaha, just across the river from Council Bluffs.
    On the weekend, mother and boy prevailed on Dad to drive them up there. O’Neill isn’t a metropolis, but it still took Eddie a while to spot the house. He wanted to head straight for the loose brick but was restrained by his parents, who knew they had to introduce themselves to the residents before starting to dismantle the foundation. The owner of the house, Thorvald Boyle, politely invited them in and listened to their story before explaining that the house still offered lodging but no longer board in this day and age. He’d acquired the house just ten years ago, when there were plenty of loose bricks in the foundation, but it had all been repointed since then. There’d also been a fish pond in the