Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 by Various

it with a touch of irony and disdain that piqued my curiosity while making it difficult to judge what he thought about it. The escapees’ enablers, Roman Catholic Franciscan priests, were fact in the public record, never contradicted or much discussed, for various reasons, by the Allied nations that had won the war against Hitler. Very old news.
    “So you’ll just show me their route?” I asked.
    “No, no,” he said, “much more than that,” his face stuck between a smile and a scowl.
    “More than what?” I asked, puzzled.
    “They’re still there,” he said softly, rubbing his dark eyebrows, “along the passage.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked, amused.
    “The pass,” he said, “splits things up. Not reliably, but often enough to be of interest…to some people.”
    “You mean to me?” I asked. “Why?”
    “They killed your family, did they not?” he asked, suddenly gazing at me with undeniable conviction. “As you told me – no?”
    We had talked at breakfast in the resort hotel, where I had stopped for some lazy time in my walking tour, and he had taken me for a likely mark.
    “Well, yes, but long ago, as I told you, in the ’30s and ’40s of the last century. My grandparents, actually.” I had no idea why I had told him anything; too much free time sometimes made me babble.
    “Yes, but the…killers are still there, in the pass,” he said, open faced, like a child.
    “Still there?” I asked. “This is 2016. Who are you talking about?”
    “As many of them that went through that way are still there. Eichmann and Bormann, and many others, to be met as often as we want to go hunting.”
    “Hunting?” I asked, annoyed by his provocation; he knew how to do it.
    He said, “But if you like, you can only watch them be killed.”
    “Watch, killed?” I asked. He was insane.
    “The others will shoot if you do not wish to do so.”
    “Others?” Even worse.
    “The living who still want it.”
    “Want what?” I asked.
    “To hunt those who fled. Thousands escaped. Only thirty thousand of some one hundred fifty thousand war criminals were ever caught or tried. Too much trouble to catch and try.”
    “Yes,” I said, aware of that much, “it was a thankless task.” Satisfying to catch, I told myself, only in the most private of circumstances of delusional revenge. No one knew how many of these personal executions took place, or how many were mistakes, but I didn’t want to discuss it with him. I’d had enough of it with my survivor parents when they were alive, who had never been able to forget the tragedies of their lost parents, the grandparents I had never had a chance to know; worse when I found out that my biological parents and two brothers had been killed, and that the parents I knew had adopted me without papers and had decided never to tell me.
    But it got out, through an uncle who was not an uncle and who told me before he died; dust in his lungs from working in a metalworking mill stopped his heart one day; only a month earlier he had told me in a drunken stupor. Both my adoptive parents were dead by then, and he increased their number by telling me about my lost originals.
    I went on a walking tour of a warming Europe in 2016, living on money market earnings which ran up to twenty percent in that decade. Maybe I thought I could walk off the past’s irritants, drain them from my brain through my feet. I saw the metal dust in my uncle’s lungs, slowly working its way to kill him as he lamented the loss of his wife and son in the Hitlerian war, and the uselessness of his unverifiable economics doctorate in America.
    A shadow had fallen across my insides with that strange uncle’s death, and I had no idea of how to rid myself of its pall, except that I knew that it would lure me back to the locale of my birth, from which I had been exported to New York City, naturalized into citizenship so I could claim my college scholarship, Americanized into ideals that were already