The Things We Cherished

by Pam Jenoff

  Charlotte hesitated. “Dzień dobry,” she said, then paused, fumbling for the right words in Polish. “We are friends of Pan Dykmans.”

  The woman cocked her head as she listened. “Nice to meet you. I’m Beata,” she said in surprisingly good English. “Come in.”

  She led them up a set of polished wood steps into a sitting room. At the far end was the very mantelpiece in front of which the photograph of the Dykmans family that Charlotte had shown Roger had been taken. The house had been immaculately restored, the furniture, curtains, and other decor an exact replica of what they must have looked like just before the war. But everything was in such good condition; Charlotte could not imagine that these things had been here and survived the decades so unscathed. Roger, she suspected, must have scoured the antique stores, paid a fortune to find the identical pieces.

  As she looked around the pristine living room, Charlotte’s anxiety rose. The house was a museum—how could they possibly find anything useful here? She turned to Beata. “Was your family in Wadowice during the war?”

  “Nie,” Beata replied. “I mean, no. My parents came from Warsaw in the fifties and stayed.”

  So the woman could not personally offer anything helpful, Charlotte thought with more than a twinge of disappointment. “Is there a basement or attic?” she asked.

  “No basement.”

  “Can you show us the attic, then?” Beata gestured that they should follow her up another flight of stairs. On the next floor there were four bedrooms, also perfectly restored. Through one of the doorways, Charlotte glimpsed two narrow beds, toys stacked on a shelf. She could almost imagine young Roger and Hans playing there. What had their relationship been like as boys?

  Beata pulled a rope from the ceiling and brought down a set of wooden attic steps that unfolded to the ground. She gestured that they could go up in a way that suggested she had no intention of joining them. “I’ll check later back,” she said, her reversed word order betraying the fact that she was not a native English speaker.

  Charlotte went first, climbing the ladder and stepping into the darkness at the top of the stairs. “There must be a light,” she said, feeling for the wall. But the fixture that she found was empty, the slot where the bulb should have been bare. She walked forward, slamming into a crate. “Oww!” she cried, clutching her shin, her voice echoing, then fading into the shadows.

  “Careful,” Jack said, now at her side, his hand warm on her shoulder. But he did not ask if she was all right, and his tone was more critical than concerned. As they spent more time together, she reflected, he seemed not so much enigmatic as just plain rude.

  Jack navigated past her with ease. There was a rustling sound as he reached the lone window and pulled back the thick, yellowed curtains, allowing light to filter in.

  Charlotte surveyed the attic. In contrast to the rest of the house, it was a mess. Wooden boxes, stacked haphazardly from floor to sloped ceiling, ran the length of the cavernous space. A fine layer of dust covered everything like a sheet.

  Jack walked across the floor, sending a sea of particles dancing through the air. “How on earth are we ever going to find anything? This could take weeks.” There was a note of rebuke in his voice, as if reminding her that the trip had been her idea. “And more to the point,” he paused to stifle a sneeze, “what are we looking for?”

  You could have disagreed with my suggestion to come here, she wanted to say. But an argument with Jack was not going to help their case. “I’m not sure, but we need to put ourselves in Roger’s shoes,” she offered instead. “Why did he keep coming back here?”

  “He said it was to restore the house.”

  “Yes, but why leave the attic in such a state? And what could be so important—” She paused in front of a waist-high stack of boxes. “Look.” The top box had been swept clean with a cloth, or perhaps a hand. “Someone’s been here, and recently. Maybe Roger?”

  Jack shook his head. “He’s been in jail for months.”

  “How about her?” Charlotte tilted her head downward, indicating the caretaker.

  “I don’t think so.” He sneezed. “She’s had access to this place for years. Why would she suddenly be interested?”

  A chill ran down Charlotte’s spine. Who else was looking into Roger’s past?

  “We might as well get started.” Jack lifted the box that had been wiped off and put it down on a narrow swath of unoccupied floor.

  Charlotte started for the next box in the stack, then stopped again. “I need to make a quick phone call. Be right back.” Jack bit his lip, as though he wanted to ask who she was calling but had thought better of it.

  She climbed back down the ladder and, not seeing the caretaker, stepped into what appeared to be the master bedroom. Pulling her BlackBerry from her bag, she found Brian’s number in the call history, then hesitated. She needed to know that he had kept up his end of the bargain by getting Kate Dolgenos to represent Marquan, but she really didn’t want to call. It wasn’t that she was nervous about speaking with him. In truth she wouldn’t have minded getting him on the phone to give him a piece of her mind for standing her up. No, she just didn’t want to discuss the fact that she was in Poland with Jack. It was her investigation now and she didn’t need to justify her decisions to him.

  She dialed a different number instead. “Defenders’ office,” Doreen blared. Her voice crackled, though whether from her perpetual gum chewing or the quality of the connection, Charlotte could not tell.

  “Doreen, it’s Charlotte. Is Mitch around by any chance?”

  “Not in yet,” the receptionist replied and Charlotte, calculating the time difference, realized that she was right.

  “Has anyone called about my client, Marquan Jones?”

  “Nah.” She could hear Doreen’s nails clacking against the keyboard, updating her Facebook status, undoubtedly. Charlotte’s anger flared. Brian had reneged on his promise after all, leaving Marquan without counsel and her thousands of miles away, unable to help. “But there’s a whole team set up in the conference room.”

  “Team?”

  “Yeah. Showed up yesterday. Kit or Kath or someone, big shot from New York.”

  “Kate Dolgenos?”

  “That’s her. Comes in all dressed up in a fancy suit with three baby lawyers following her like mice and says your office is too small. So Ramirez gave them the conference room.” Charlotte cringed, wondering if Mitch was annoyed by the intrusion or grateful for the help. She should have given him a heads-up but hadn’t wanted to say anything until she was sure Brian would come through. “They’ve been in there ever since,” Doreen added.

  Charlotte exhaled. “Thanks, Doreen.” So Brian had kept his promise and Marquan had the very best counsel available. She only hoped it would be enough.

  She climbed back up the stairs to the attic. “Everything okay?” Jack asked. He had moved on to a different box and did not look up.

  He thought that I called Brian, she realized, hearing the tightness in his voice. She was suddenly aware of the magnitude of the rift between the two brothers, which seemed to have been worsened by the years. “Just checking in on a client,” she explained as she knelt before the box once more. “There’s this kid, Marquan, and I repped him a few years ago on something minor. I’d gotten him into an after-school program and he really seemed to be turning it around. Only now he’s gotten caught up in a carjacking that went bad, and two little kids got killed.”

  “That’s hard,” Jack replied, his voice neutral.

  “He’s a really good kid,” she insisted, kneeling by one of the boxes and opening it. “Smart, so much potential.”

  “Sure.” But she could tell that he was not convinced.

  “You don’t believe me.”

  He shrugged. “I just never saw you doing criminal defense work, that’s all. Crossing over to the dark side.” He did not bother to keep from sounding judgmental now.

  Of course. Jack had known her in law school, when she thought s
he would spend her career as a prosecutor. That was so long ago it felt like another lifetime. And Jack viewed defenders as mercenary sharks, willing to represent anyone for money. She had felt that way herself once upon a time. “It’s not that way at all.” But even as she spoke, she knew there were plenty of lawyers just like that. So what made her think she was different? “I’m a public defender, for one thing,” she said aloud, though as much for herself as for Jack. “So clearly this isn’t about the money.”

  He rubbed his nose with the back of his sleeve. “But you have to represent everyone who comes along, even the really rotten cases.”

  That was true, she conceded inwardly. The public defender’s office was the last stop for those who couldn’t afford an attorney. Everyone was entitled to a fair defense and so for many people they were it.

  “It must be better, though, working with juveniles,” he offered, seeming to sense her inner conflict. “I mean, most of them aren’t hardened criminals, at least not yet.”

  She looked up at him, surprised by the note of empathy in his voice, the first sign of warmth she’d detected since her arrival. There are some pretty tough kids where I come from, she wanted to say, but didn’t. Of course in some ways it was easier representing the Marquans of the world, with their youthful soft voices and gentle eyes suggesting that they were not yet beyond reach. But there was always a specter of fear looming over her, that she would open the newspaper and read about a murder committed by someone she’d successfully gotten off of a charge, or for whom she’d negotiated a reduced sentence. The knowledge that the person was on the street because of her.

  That had not happened yet, thankfully, but there had been something just as bad, maybe worse. Last February when it was bitterly cold and sleeting, she had walked the underground concourse between Locust Street and City Hall, trying to breathe shallowly to make its urine-soaked stench bearable. As she passed the row of homeless people, mostly black men, that lined the passageway, her guilt rose and she fought the urge to stop and give them each something. Would they spend the money on food or drugs? She could not help them all, she thought, reminding herself of the regular donations she made to charities like Project H.O.M.E. and Philabundance.

  “Please,” one of the men said and there was something familiar about the voice.

  She looked down and her heart broke as she recognized a boy she had represented on a drug charge three years earlier. She stopped and knelt, heedless of the filthy floor. “James?”

  “Hullo, Miz Charlotte.” His voice was the same. She managed a smile, but inwardly she screamed. She had not asked James what had happened to him, how he had come to be there, not wanting to embarrass him. Instead she had bought him breakfast at the nearest hot dog stand, then had given him the rest of the money she had in her wallet, not in fact caring what he spent it on. She wrote down the phone numbers to the shelters and soup kitchens from memory and made him promise to come see her in the office later that day so she could help him further. As she walked away, leaving her heart behind on the concourse floor, she knew he would not show and after he had not, she returned to the same spot but he was gone. The image had haunted her for months. How had he come to be there? Could she have done something different to change his fate?

  “What is it?” Jack asked, interrupting her thoughts, and for a minute she considered telling him about James. But she didn’t, knowing it would only reinforce his perceptions of her work.

  She lifted a stack of documents from the box. “Nothing.”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” he offered. “I just always saw you as a prosecutor.”

  She shook her head. “I never had the stomach for it. I mean, the big war criminals, sure. But I interned one semester at the U.S. attorney’s office and I found I just didn’t like putting people away, especially when I looked at their families in the back of the courtroom.”

  “Those kids killed in the carjacking had families too.” His brusque tone had returned, any sign of the understanding he’d exhibited a few minutes earlier now gone.

  “I know that.” Her frustration grew. “I’m not saying it’s black and white. Anyway, you’re a defender now too,” she pointed out.

  “Only for this case.” He waved his hand, refusing to acknowledge the conflict. “This is just a stopping place for me until I figure out what I am going to do next.” She waited for him to elaborate, but he turned wordlessly back to the box.

  She looked down at the stack of yellowed papers before her, setting them on the floor so as not to jostle them. It was the first rule of research, whether poring over documents in a dusty archive in Kiev or going through a police locker in North Philly: preserve the materials intact in order not to destroy their evidentiary value.

  “Well, this is interesting,” Jack said, straightening. Charlotte looked up to see him holding a brown leather portfolio. “Roger’s papers from when he was a student at the university in Breslau.”

  Where Hans had also been stationed as a diplomat, she recalled. “And …”

  He unfolded a piece of paper, which had yellowed with age. “My dearest Magda,” he began, translating from German.

  “Dearest,” Charlotte repeated. “Who’s Magda, I wonder?”

  “No idea. But I guess our Roger wasn’t such a loner after all.”

  “What does it say?”

  Jack shrugged indifferently. “Nothing much. Some routine talk about summer in Wadowice.” He paused, an eyebrow raised. “And that he’s counting the days until September.”

  “When he could return to school,” she surmised. “Magda must have been in Breslau. But why would the letter Roger wrote still be in his folder?”

  Jack turned over the envelope. “Because for whatever reason, he never sent it.” He set the paper aside. “Not sure it has much relevance to the case, though.”

  Charlotte wanted to disagree. A relationship, or even an unrequited crush, could go to the very essence of who Roger Dykmans was, why he might or might not be guilty. But Jack had lowered his head and was engrossed in the papers before him once more, so she returned to the box before her. The documents appeared to be routine, she observed. Bills that had been paid, a ledger recording household expenses, recipes held together by a rusty clip. The Dykmanses, it seemed, had not thrown anything out.

  Pausing again, Charlotte peered at Jack out of the corner of her eye. He was more attractive than Brian now, she decided. His lean figure had not given way to paunchiness, as his brother’s had, and the lines that had formed at the corners of his eyes gave him a more interesting look than he had years ago.

  She looked down at the papers once more, but her eyes, dry from the dust and reading, blurred. “Tell me more about the case,” she said, leaning back on her heels, eager for a break.

  He lifted his head. “Well, generally speaking, Nazi war crimes prosecutions are a crapshoot. Some countries, like Syria and unbelievably Austria, refuse to cooperate with the international community at all. Sweden has a statute of limitations and takes the position that it cannot prosecute for that reason. Others, like the Baltic states, participate in a token manner but never really bring a case against anyone who is fit to stand trial. They’re really more interested in prosecuting former Communist leaders.”

  Of course, she thought. Those crimes are so much fresher and more personal for the living population. Naturally there’s more of a mandate to pursue those cases than to vindicate Jews gone for decades, whom they never wanted in the first place.

  “And even where there is a will,” Jack continued, “prosecuting crimes against Nazi war criminals is a ticking time bomb. Fewer and fewer are still alive and of those many are medically unfit to stand trial.

  “The United States created a group at Justice in the seventies, the Office of Special Investigations, to track down Nazis who had somehow slipped into the U.S. and were living there undetected.” His face grew more animated as he delved into the topic, picking up steam. “They’re unable to prosecute the Nazis for actu
al war crimes that took place outside their jurisdiction. So instead they use the tactic of having them denaturalized and deported.”

  “I’ve read about it,” she said, recalling something from the files she’d reviewed at the hotel the previous evening. The approach had worked and the United States had successfully prosecuted several dozen cases, more than all of the other countries combined. But it was a drop of sand compared to the millions who had died, the thousands who had perpetrated the crimes against them. She had wondered several times if it was worthwhile, spending all of the money bringing to justice a handful of senior citizens while war crimes continued unabated in the Sudan and elsewhere. But it sent a message, symbolic and important: We have not forgotten.

  “The cases seemed to flag for several years,” Jack explained. “Then the Soviet Union collapsed and a vast number of documents suddenly became available to help identify and find the former Nazis.”

  She opened her mouth to ask how it all related to Roger’s case. But Jack had turned back to his documents and seemed to be concentrating deeply. They worked intensely for some time, the silence broken only by the sound of a bird chirping in the eaves. “Nothing in this box,” Jack announced sometime later. She could sense his frustration—so much time wasted and nothing to show for it. At this pace, they could be here for weeks, which was time they didn’t have.

  “Mine either.” She stood up, stretching her right foot to relieve a cramp in her leg. “Are we missing something? Are there people, maybe, who we should be talking to, who could point us in the right direction?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jack replied. “I asked Roger that when I told him we were coming here, but he said that it’s been so many years, everyone who knew his family has either emigrated or died.”

  Charlotte nodded. It was one of the great challenges of researching the Holocaust. The generation that had witnessed it all was dying off by the thousands each day, their experiences slipping away like sand through one’s fingers. “Maybe we should approach this differently,” she suggested, scanning the attic once more. He tilted his head. “I mean, the box that someone has been through is probably least likely to have what we’re looking for, because if there was something relevant, the person likely would have taken it, right?”