Beat the Reaper: A Novel Read Online Free

them dead. They and a bunch of other newly feral teenagers were hiding out in the snow and trying to kill off enough of the local Jew-hunting parties so that the Poles would leave them alone. What this precisely involved they never told me, but it must have been pretty ferocious, because in 1943 Hermann Göring had a lodge at the southern end of Białowieża where he and his guests dressed as Roman senators, and he must have been aware of the situation. There’s also the question of a straggler platoon of Hitler’s Sixth Army that disappeared in Białowieża that winter en route to Stalingrad. Where, to be fair, it would have been wiped out anyway.
    What finally got my grandparents caught was a scam. They got word from a man in Kraków named Władysław Budek that my grandmother’s brother, who had been working in Kraków as a spy for the Bishop of Berlin, * had been captured and sent to the Podgorze “Ghetto,” which was a holding pen on the rails to the Camps. Budek claimed he could get my mother’s brother out for 18,000 zlotys, or whatever the fuck money they were using then. Since my grandparents had no money, and were suspicious anyway, they went to Kraków themselves to check things out. Budek called the police and sold them into Auschwitz.
    It was typical of my grandparents that they later described being sent to Auschwitz as a stroke of luck, since not only was it better than being shot by Polish crackers in some forest, it was better than being sent to a death camp. * At Auschwitz they were able to contact each other twice through smuggled notes— which, to hear them tell it, made surviving until liberation easy.
    Their funeral was near my Uncle Barry’s place. This was my mother’s brother, who had freaked out and become an Orthodox Jew. My grandparents had certainly considered themselves Jewish—they had visited and supported Israel, for example, and were dismayed by the world’s quick demonization of it—but to them being Jewish meant they had certain moral and intellectual responsibilities, not that religion was anything other than a bloodstained hoax. My mother had burned through every traditional form of rebellion before Barry could even get started, though, so dressing like a shtetl dweller in 1840s Poland was probably his only recourse.
    My mother attended the funeral and asked me if I needed her to stay in the U.S., and whether I wanted to move to Rome. My father did me the favor of not pretending: he just sent me a rambling, slightly touching letter about his relationship with his own grandparents and how as you go through life you never really feel any older. *
    Barry adopted me to keep Child Protective Services off my back, but it was easy to convince him to let me stay in my grandparents’ house. At fourteen I was physically enormous and had the mannerisms of an elderly Polish Jewish doctor. I liked to play bridge. Plus, Barry and his wife weren’t crazy about exposing their own four kids to someone who’d been abandoned at birth and then come home one day to find his foster parents dead by violence. What if I became dangerous?
    What indeed. Smart move, Barry and Mrs. Barry!
    I sought out the dangerousness and refined it. As any other American child would, I picked Batman and Charles Bronson in Death Wish as role models. I didn’t have their resources, but I didn’t have much in the way of expenses, either. I hadn’t even had the carpets changed.
    I felt I had no choice but to take on the case myself. I still feel that way, really.
    I know from experience, for instance, that if you go into the woods and shoot a handful of survivalist pedophile pimps—men who have destroyed the lives of literally hundreds of children—then the police will go apeshit trying to find you. They will check the drains in case you washed your hands after running them through your hair. They will cast for tire tracks.
    But if the two people you care about most get brutally murdered by some scumbag who rifles a