“So maybe she’s not up there. But keep checking.” He wrote her assignment in the book. “I think we’re all set for the time being. I’m going down to the morgue and see what Pathology has come up with. Ernesto’s body was released an hour ago. The funeral is set at six o’clock and everyone should be there. Whatever happened, even if Ernesto was involved in his own demise, it still was a terrible tragedy for the parents. Anyone have something important to add, talk now.”

Silence ensued.

Decker stood up. “Adios, amigos, and good luck.”

Most of the library’s free floor space had been taken up with boxes and folding chairs from last night’s lecture—a very successful event with over two hundred in attendance according to Georgia Rackman, the Center’s primary archivist. She was a big woman with thick wrists and ankles and big hair—bleached blond and sprayed stiff. Her face was round, open, and smooth, her brown eyes emphasized by a heavy coat of eyeliner. She spoke with a heavy Texas drawl, and made no excuses when her voice elevated above acceptable volume levels.

“In Dallas,” she exclaimed, “we do everything on a grand scale.”

The library was filled with standard bracket shelving that held thousands of tomes, all of them dedicated to the ashes of war. So many titles…too many memoirs: The Archives of the Holocaust, The Holocaust and the History of the Rise of Israel, The Jews of Warsaw, The Death Camp Diaries, The Warsaw Uprising, Walking with Ghosts…But Jews weren’t the only ethnic group represented. There were also sections on the massacres of the Armenians, the bomb drops and subsequent carnage wreaked upon the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the annihilations of the Cambodians under Pol Pot, the civil war between the Hutus and Tutsis in Africa, the bloodbath in the Belgian Congo. It was clear to Rina that no one group could claim its persecution as unique—a very sad commentary on the human condition.

The small library supported one full-time librarian, one full-time archivist, one part-time archivist, and two male exchange students from Austria who satisfied their country’s military obligations by working for the Center for a year.

Georgia sat at her desk in front of her computer and sifted through the black-and-white photographs that Rina had given her. “They don’t tell me much. I don’t even know if they’re authentic. The paper looks too new.”

Rina mulled over the options. “You can do a lot with computers nowadays. Or maybe they’re recently printed but taken from old negatives.”

“Now, there’s a thought.” Georgia looked. “Unfortunately, they don’t tell me anything specific. But I’ll show them around. Almost no one survived Treblinka. You know that.”

Rina sat next to her. “I know that.”