The Things We Cherished (25 page)

“That’s pretty much what we expected, isn’t it?” Brian asked. “That Magda died, I mean.”

She nodded. “But knowing—well, I think that’s going to be harder on Roger than anything.”

“If we tell him,” Jack interjected.

“If?” she repeated in disbelief. “How can we not?”

“I’m just saying that the timing isn’t great. Maybe we wait.” She opened her mouth to protest. Wasn’t knowing always better? But he raised his hand. “We can argue about that on the way back. Right now, we need to get to the clock shop.”

Outside the storm had stopped, leaving behind small puddles at the curb. They navigated around the bike racks and a short queue of waiting taxis, walked in the direction of the city center without speaking. As they reached the heart of the baroque Old Town, a light rain began to fall once more. Brian produced an umbrella and opened it over her.

They paused for a moment near the Salzburger Dom, huddling in the shadow of the cathedral as Jack consulted a map, then walked to a nearby shop to ask directions. Charlotte gazed from the now-vacant outdoor cafés up to the Hohensalzburg Castle, a massive
fortress sitting on a hilltop overlooking the town. On her few earlier visits, she had always been indifferent to Salzburg. It seemed, like the rest of Austria, too perfect, a movie-set idea of what Europe was supposed to look like. And the pristine, untroubled environs gave no hint of the barbarism that had taken place there just over half a century ago.

She looked back down again. Across the street she saw Jack, watching her through the shop window. She expected him to once again look away, but he caught her gaze, held it. A shiver passed through her. In that moment, she knew that the feelings were not hers alone. But then she remembered his comments about her to Brian on the train. How could she reconcile the man who seemed so dismissive when discussing her with his brother with the one who gazed at her with such longing now?

Jack returned a moment later and led them wordlessly from the square. They turned off the main thoroughfare into a narrow cobblestone alley. “This should be it,” he said, stopping in front of a window cluttered with cheaply made cuckoo clocks.

An unseen bell jangled faintly as they opened the door. The shop was equally unimpressive inside. Rows of nearly identical cuckoo clocks intended for the tourists mingled indiscriminately with porcelain figurines clad in traditional Austrian garb. On the wall a faded poster advertised the
Sound of Music
tour in English. The shop was covered with a fine coat of dust, Charlotte noticed, as though nothing had been disturbed—or sold—in years. How could one possibly make a living with a business such as this?

She looked up, exchanging uncertain glances with Jack. But Brian pressed forward, undeterred. “Hello,” he called loudly at the counter, his American bluster a cliché. Charlotte cringed.

From a doorway behind the counter, a man appeared. Wizened
and bald, he had to be close to ninety. Almost the same age as Roger, Charlotte calculated, though the man looked twenty years older than their client. He blinked, as though surprised to actually have visitors in the store. “Can I help you?” His English, while broken, was comprehensible, a baseline knowledge of the language that she guessed was necessitated by his tourist clientele.

“We’re here about a clock,” Brian announced abruptly.

“Of course. If you don’t see anything you like here on the floor, I have some lovely larger cuckoos I can show you.”

“Excuse me,” Jack said, stepping forward. “I’m afraid we may have misspoken.” Even without looking, Charlotte could feel the daggers Brian was shooting at his brother, furious at being corrected. She bit her lip, praying he would not say anything to interrupt what Jack was trying to do. “We’re looking for a very specific clock. Are you Herr Beamer?” Charlotte did not recall Roger giving them the clockmaker’s name, but the man nodded slightly. “We were sent by Roger Dykmans.”

The clockmaker hesitated, a strange look crossing his face. Clearly he had heard of Roger, but how much did he know, or care, about the case? It would have been impossible to avoid unless one had no source of news, no contact with the outside world. “You know Herr Dykmans?” Jack prompted.

The clockmaker did not answer but led them with a gesture through a second doorway at the back of the shop. Suddenly, it was as if they were transported to another world, a century earlier perhaps, far removed from the bustle of the touristy thoroughfare. It was a workshop, simply lit, the smell of sawdust and turpentine thick in the air. Clocks of every size and description covered the walls, the workbench, and the counter, in various states of composition and repair. From all around came the ticking of the endlessly moving timepieces.

The man cleared a space on one of the benches and indicated that it was for Charlotte. She started to sit down, then leapt up again, suppressing a yelp. There on the bench lay a dead bird, stiff and motionless. The man reached down and picked it up. It was then that she noticed it was not dead but fake, as he returned it to its place inside one of the clocks on the table. It had only looked real.

She perched awkwardly on the edge of the bench, scanning the room. There were clocks of every shape and size, but none resembled the one in the photo. “So about Herr Dykmans,” she tried again.

The old man wrinkled his brow. “I’ve never met Herr Dykmans personally, but he contacted me a few months ago about a matter.” The man spoke cryptically as though he were guarding state secrets and not an inquiry about a timepiece. “I haven’t heard from him again, though.”

“He was, um, unexpectedly detained,” Charlotte replied, glad that the man had not linked Roger with the accused war criminal in the headlines. Though perhaps, she thought cynically, he would not have minded. Austria had sided readily with the Nazis and had seemed to do little to atone for the war in the years since. “But we’re here on his behalf. Do you have the clock he was looking for?”

Herr Beamer eyed them warily, as though unsure whether they could be trusted. Then he walked to the shelf and rummaged among the clocks, packed so tightly she was not sure how he could tell one from the next. But he reached to the back and pulled out a burlap bag. He carried it over and set it on the table, gingerly removing the covering to reveal a small tabletop clock set under a dome of glass.

“This is it,” he said, and there was a glint in his eye that signaled the presence of something particularly rare and special in his trade. “Are you acquainted with this type of clock?”

None of them responded. “This is called an anniversary or four-hundred-day clock,” the shopkeeper continued. “It is so named because it was made so that it only needed to be wound once a year.” Charlotte studied the clock, able to see it now in closer detail than had been possible in the photograph. There were four curved brass prongs suspended beneath the porcelain face, circular pendulums that she suspected would rotate in one direction and then the other if the clock was working and wound.

“The design was actually pioneered in America,” the old man continued, and Charlotte looked up at him, surprised. The timepiece seemed innately European, so at home here in this world of clocks. “But a traveler brought the clock design to Germany at the turn of the century and it really took off here. So much so that American soldiers purchased them as souvenirs and took them back home in great numbers when the war was over.”

“It’s not a particularly scarce clock, then?” Jack asked.

The man shook his head. “Not at all.”

Charlotte’s spirits fell. If this type of clock was so common, what had made Roger think this was the one he was looking for?

“But the clock your friend inquired about was unique,” Herr Beamer added, seeming to read her thoughts. “It was the first known anniversary clock made in Europe, designed at the turn of the century by a Bavarian farmer. Later the clocks were produced in the factories, but I researched this one and it is handmade and quite distinctive.” He pointed to a mark on the front of the clock. At first glance it appeared to be a chip, a place where the clock had been dropped or bumped. But upon closer examination, Charlotte could see that it was actually the initials
JRR
engraved in the base. “This insignia sets the clock apart.”

“May I see it?” she asked. The man nodded. She picked the clock up. It was much smaller than she had imagined from the pictures,
not even a foot high, though the brass base gave it a certain heft. The details were more intimate than the photograph had shown, the legs that supported the face elegant twists of gold. The pendulums did not move, she noted, but sat fixed in time, as did the hands of the clock, set at ten minutes to six. When had the clock last worked, she wondered? Had it simply run out and not been rewound or had something caused it to suddenly stop?

“Can you tell us where you got it?” Charlotte asked.

Herr Beamer bit his lip. There was a certain sensitivity, she knew, among those who bought and sold artifacts from the war, even if they had been honestly procured, a kind of guilt about benefiting from the belongings of the dead. The shopkeeper went to a file drawer that looked like something from an old library and pulled out a card. “This clock came to us from Heidelberg. It was sold to us by someone who had bought it off a young girl on the black market many years ago. She said it belonged to a Jewish family in Berlin before the war and she’d found it left behind.”

“Berlin,” Jack interrupted. “That can’t be right. The Dykmans clock was in Breslau through the war.”

The shopkeeper shrugged. “The records are often unreliable.”

Jack stepped closer, pointed to a small, round mark on the back of the clock. “What do you make of this?”

Charlotte ran her hand expertly over the strange, uneven hole. She wasn’t a firearms expert but she had seen enough in her line of work to recognize the shape. “A bullet,” she replied authoritatively. “It must have grazed the clock but not gone through.”

“Quite a lucky break for whoever the shot was intended for,” Jack mused.

“And for the clock,” the shopkeeper added. “If the bullet had hit the glass, the whole thing would have been destroyed.”

Jack walked over to the table and pulled the clock closer to
him. He was just inches away from her now, and despite everything that had happened, it was all Charlotte could do not to shiver. He picked it up and turned it over gently.

“I’m sorry but the timepiece is very valuable,” Herr Beamer said. “I’m afraid I must ask—”

“I won’t hurt it,” Jack promised, sounding as though he was talking about a living creature. On the bottom was a piece of brown cloth. Jack pried it back to reveal a brass base. Reaching out for a file that was on the workbench, he worked to separate the base from the clock.

“Carefully …” Herr Beamer implored under his breath.

It was a fake bottom, she realized. The actual base, now revealed, contained a small door. The compartment containing the information.

The clockmaker gasped. “I had no idea. How did you know?”

Jack did not answer but worked at the small door. The room was completely silent except for the clocks that chirped like a flock of birds around them. There was a quiet pop and the door gave way. Jack reached inside, prying around with his finger, then shook his head, grimacing.

“Can you?” he asked Charlotte. “Your fingers are smaller.” He held out the clock to her and she reached inside the compartment, feeling around the small box. Then she removed her hand, holding up her empty palm for the others to see.

“There’s nothing in it,” she said. The compartment that supposedly contained the truth about what Roger had done was empty.

BRESLAU
,
1943

Roger opened his eyes. He had slept a bit longer than usual after Magda’s predawn departure and bright morning sunlight now streamed through the curtains. He stood, then walked to the window and opened it a crack. The air, though still brisk, carried a hint of spring. Birds called to one another from the eaves above.

He felt a strange sensation, an emotion so long forgotten he had trouble identifying it. Optimism, he recognized finally. His change in mood was a marked contrast to recent weeks, when he had awoken with a sense of dread that made him want to pull the duvet up and hide. Looking down at the empty courtyard of the synagogue below, it was not hard to understand why he had been so morose. Things had gotten undeniably worse in the winter months. Lectures at the university had been suspended without explanation for the rest of the semester. Rations had become tighter and the sirens sounded continuously at night.