Before she hit the master lights to illuminate the stacks of the old Carnegie library, she raised her eyes and looked outside through the glass door.
On the corner of the next block, the man who’d left the package stood partly illuminated by the blue glow of an overhead streetlight. He raised his hand tentatively and waved.
She read a message in his wave that might or might not be true. To her, the wave said, It’s your problem now.
Then he turned and walked off into the dark.
* * *
—
After she’d made a cup of strong coffee in the Keurig machine, Marybeth turned to the package in the middle of her desk and took a photo of it—just in case.
As she pulled on a pair of latex gloves from the archive department, she wondered if her precautions were even necessary. But she’d learned over the years from working closely with Joe and other law enforcement personnel that it was better to be methodical when it came to studying unknown objects. The parcel could turn out to be important in some way. The circumstances in which the mystery man had left it there suggested that he placed value on it. Fingerprints or DNA on the wrapping could even help identify him.
Marybeth used an X-Acto knife to carefully slice through the tape—she didn’t want to tear the paper if she could avoid it. She recognized the rough brown wrap as that of a grocery bag from Valley Foods, the local grocery store. Meaning the man who left it was likely from the area.
She peeled back the paper on the top until she could see that inside was, indeed, a very thick book. Not a book, exactly, but a very odd leather-bound binder.
The front cover was wrapped in dark red leather held in place by a heavy silver square, with an X in the middle made of silver as well. A large round medallion was in the center of the X, featuring a full-bodied eagle on a platform, its wings spread and its balled talons curled up as if showing off its biceps. The silver was tarnished with age.
Heavy silver rivets in the shape of four-leaf clovers attached the silver work to the leather. They also separated a series of heavy numbers on the bottom of the cover:
1 9 3 * 7
Marybeth frowned not only at the date but at the font. It was Gothic Germanic, popular in Germany in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.
It wasn’t a binder, after all. It was a photo album.
And when she leaned over it to get a closer look, she saw the Nazi swastikas carved into the silver of the X.
Then she opened it and gasped and thought, It’s your problem now.
CHAPTER FIVE
Marybeth and the Nazis
Marybeth spent the rest of the morning studying each thick page, by turns mystified, enthralled, and enraged.
The binder appeared to be authentic. It had a musty odor, but it was in excellent condition overall. The pages were filled with hundreds of original black-and-white images either glued to the paper or mounted by small corner pockets. There were very few handwritten captions, but it wasn’t long before she realized what she was looking at.
In chronological order, the album memorialized a year in the life of a Nazi government official named Julius Streicher. Marybeth had never heard of him before. The first page of the album was titled simply:
Das
Jahr
1937
The Year 1937.
In all, there were over one hundred and seventy-five pages. Some contained a single image, and others as many as six.
The first large photo was of a portly bald man with a slight toothbrush-style mustache gazing off at something while posing with his fists tucked into his waist. His chest was thrust out and his chin was raised haughtily and he wore a uniform with an iron cross pinned to the breast pocket. Behind him was the top of a flagpole. The pose suggested that this was a man to be admired.
The second photo chilled her to the bone. A black-leather-clad Streicher reached out for the hand of an obviously delighted Adolf Hitler. An airplane on a runway provided the background. In the foreground, two uniformed soldiers smiled on while one raised his hand in a Hitler salute. A young blond girl with braided hair trailed Streicher, carrying a bouquet of flowers.
The hand-lettered caption read: Der Führer und Gauleiter Streicher auf dem Flugplatz in Nürnberg.
She knew enough German to know that it said Streicher was greeting “the Leader” on an airfield in Nuremberg. She had to look up Gauleiter and found it was the term for the governor of a regional branch of the Nazi Party.
Julius Streicher, she determined, was no mere party functionary. In many of the photos, he posed with men who were somewhat familiar to her from the twentieth-century history classes she’d taken in college. Methodically, she looked them up as she proceeded, matching the faces with those of top Nazi officials.