The Things We Cherished (28 page)

“Yes. But my intention was that as soon as I found Magda and Anna, I would send Hans a telegram through his contacts, telling him that his plan had been compromised so that he could change it. I thought I could give the information to Koch but still get to my brother in time. That way I would save Magda and our, I mean, her daughter.”

So the child was his after all, Charlotte thought. Roger continued, “That way, no one would be hurt.” He paused to rub his eyes.

“But it didn’t work,” Jack said, prompting him.

“No. Koch took the information, then claimed that Magda had
already been removed from the city, that she was at a transit camp outside Munich. I raced there, but it was a lie, or too late. Magda was gone.”

Charlotte swallowed. “And Hans?”

Roger shook his head. “Arrested. He and his associates, and all of the people …” He still could not bring himself to call them children. “All of the people that Hans was trying to save were killed.”

“So you never sent the telegram,” Jack said flatly.

“I tried,” Roger replied in a tone that suggested he had tried to convince himself of the fact many times over the years. “Before I left to find Magda, I wrote a telegram to Hans, telling him the plan was compromised. I intended to send it as soon as I returned.”

“And you hid the telegram in the clock?” Charlotte asked.

“Yes, and I hid the clock in a hole in the wall that Magda had made as a possible hiding place. I knew that if the Nazis came to the house again, they wouldn’t look there. And if I couldn’t get back, I could get someone to find the telegram and send it for me.”

“Who?” Jack asked.

“There were neighbors next door, the Baders, who were known to be sympathetic to the Jewish plight. I left them a note asking them to please send the telegram for me if I didn’t return in two days’ time.” His shoulders sagged. “But I guess they never did.”

“What happened after that?”

“After I made inquiries at the transit camp, I was detained by the Gestapo. They wanted to know why I was nosing around, and they thought I had more information about Hans’s work. Eventually they realized that I didn’t know anything and let me go. But by then it was too late.”

Too late, Charlotte thought. If only Roger had taken the time to send the telegram before racing off after Magda, things might have been so different.

“As I told you the other day,” Roger continued, “I searched and searched for Magda, and my brother too, of course, though we soon learned the truth about his fate.”

“But you never found out what happened to Magda?”

“No, though at one of the deportation camps, I heard a story about a girl escaping and I thought …” His voice trailed off.

A rumor, Charlotte thought, so vague it could have been about anybody. Yet it had fueled Roger’s hope for all of these years. She and Jack exchanged uneasy looks over Roger’s head. They now had the very piece of information Roger had sought for decades. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but we learned that isn’t what happened.”

“Oh?” Roger’s voice trembled.

“Yes. I’m afraid that Magda died in the camps.”

Roger’s face turned stony. “How?”

She hesitated. But even as she dreaded telling the old man the gruesome truth about his one love, she knew that he needed to hear it in order to believe that it was true. “The gas,” she said simply.

Roger’s jaw slackened slightly, his expression turning from shock to disbelief as he digested the news and the truth replaced the hopes and assumptions he’d carried with him for so long. He leaned forward, dropping his head to his hands. Then he sank to the floor so swiftly that Charlotte wondered for a second if he might have passed out. But then he began heaving with great sobs.

Charlotte watched helplessly as Brian and Jack helped the old man back into the chair. The trips to Poland, the search for the clock. For Roger, it had always been about learning the truth about Magda. Surely he could not have thought after all of these years that the result might have been anything but this.

But at the same time she understood. Against reason, part of Roger had stubbornly clung to the belief that the answer might have been somehow different. That Magda had escaped and lived,
even briefly. Now he was faced with the undeniable truth that the desperate measures he took to try to save Magda, which resulted in the deaths of so many, had all been in vain. Everything else he had been able to take over the years, but this was the breaking point.

Jack walked to the intercom to summon the guards, waving Charlotte and Brian away. “How could you?” Brian demanded of Charlotte as they stepped out into the hall.

“He had the right to know the truth.”

“You’ve taken away everything he had to fight for.”

“No,” she protested, eyes flaring, unwilling to back down. “Now that he knows the truth about Magda, he can concentrate on fighting for his freedom.” But inwardly she cringed, hearing the weakness in her own argument. Had she made a fatal mistake by telling him?

A few minutes later, when the guards had come and gone again, they walked back in the room. Roger sat slumped to one side, calmer now, eyes glassy from a sedative of some sort. “Excuse me,” he said, as though apologizing to guests for being late.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m sorry the news was such a shock.”

“I suppose I always knew.” He dipped his chin at the admission. “Still, part of me thought …” He did not finish the sentence.

Charlotte nodded. Despite its vast improbability, Roger had held fast to that one shred of hope that perhaps Magda had somehow survived, might even be alive today. It was the thing that had kept him going, enabled him to live with his ghosts and demons for all of these years. With that now gone, his entire world had crumbled.

“Herr Dykmans,” Jack began more softly than she had heard him speak. He stepped forward. “I know that this is an incredibly painful time for you, but we must think about the trial. We only have a week—”

Charlotte looked up, surprised. Surely he didn’t mean to tell Roger about the possibility of the case being elevated now, on top
of everything else. Jack cleared his throat. “That is, we simply don’t have the evidence we need.” But Roger turned to the wall. The news about Magda had taken away his will to live, any reason he might have had to fight.

“Dammit,” Brian swore half an hour later, running a finger along the rim of his glass. Roger had sat stone-faced, unwilling or unable to respond to their entreaties for additional information that might help his case. When it was clear they would get no further, they had left the prison and now sat on stools clustered around a high table in the hotel bar. “Three countries and we’ve got nothing.” She held her breath, waiting for him to berate her again for sharing with Roger the news about Magda, but he did not.

“I think,” Jack spoke slowly, “we need to consider a plea deal.”

Charlotte watched him uneasily. Brian had returned from the bar a few minutes earlier with three vodka tonics. He did not, she realized, know the story of his brother’s recent drinking problem, his need for abstinence. Jack had lifted the glass once, almost reflexively, and she had held her breath, waiting for him to take a sip and bring a wrecking ball to the thin wall of sobriety he’d rebuilt. But then he set the glass down and did not pick it up again.

“Hell no!” Brian exploded so loudly that a couple of women at the next table looked up to stare. He dealt in the world of high-stakes litigation, going for the big wins. He hadn’t learned to swim in the murky waters of compromise, where sometimes meeting in the middle was the closest thing to a victory you got.

“We have less than a week,” Jack pressed, making his case. “If we lose, it’s life in prison without possibility of parole.”

“And if we plead, he’s still going to get five or ten years at least,” Brian replied. “That’s a life sentence when you’re Roger’s age.”

Brian had a point, Charlotte reflected. Jack, however, was not convinced. “But we have to try to do something,” he persisted. “If
we walk into court with nothing, they’re going to eat him alive. The Germans have been under a lot of international pressure and they’re looking for a big case with which to make a statement and show the world they’re serious about chasing down the war criminals. They want to make an example of Roger.”

Charlotte took a large sip of her own drink, savoring the sting. She tuned out the debate between the two brothers, which played itself out like an old record. Always on opposite sides of the fence, vying for control.

What were they fighting for, anyway? Roger had admitted to doing the very thing he’d been accused of and he was willing to accept his punishment. Maybe we should just make a deal and get him the most lenient sentence possible, she thought. Not because going to trial would be risky, as Jack feared, but because it was what Roger wanted.

Charlotte thought back to her cases over the years. She had defended some of the most broken kids society had to offer, kids who had hurt others seemingly without any remorse. Yet she had always found a shred of redemption, a shred of humanity she could cling to in order to push forward with their defense. Here, there was no doubt Roger had acted out of his love for Magda and Anna, his desire to save them. But the futility of his actions and the magnitude of the tragedy that had resulted from them were simply too great, and there was part of her that was tapped out, unwilling to go any further.

“So you just want to quit?” Brian demanded of his brother.

“I’m not saying that,” Jack replied. “But sometimes you have to cut your losses.”

Brian did not respond, but stood and stormed from the bar. “He just doesn’t understand how these criminal matters work,” Jack lamented. “And I don’t want to approach the prosecutor until we’re
all on the same page. Because if she picks up on any sign of weakness and smells blood—” He stopped as she turned away. “Charley, what’s wrong?”

“I’m sick of it. This goddamned game between you and Brian. Always being caught in the middle. Like the thing that no one wants but can’t take the trouble to give away.”

He stared at her blankly. “What—?”

“I heard you on the train, telling Brian not to bother with me.”

“What? Oh God no, you’ve got it all wrong.” He stood up, running his hand through his hair as he paced. “I was telling Brian not to be an asshole and hurt you all over again.”

She slammed down her glass. “Brian and I are none of your concern. I’m a big girl, I can take care of myself.”

“No, that’s not it either. I’m really fucking this up, aren’t I?” She was surprised. Profanity was Brian’s style, not Jack’s. “Charley, do you remember the day we met?”

Her mind reeled back to a barbecue at the Warringtons’ beach house in the early autumn. Weary from the endless introductions and inane conversation, she had escaped down the back terrace to a dock overlooking the bay. “You were standing by the edge of the water,” he continued. “Your skirt was pink and you had some sort of flower in your hair, iris, maybe.”

“Aster,” she said, the image crystallizing in her mind. She had turned, expecting to see Brian approaching. Instead, there had been this thinner version of him, watching her from a distance.

“You were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And then when we spoke, I thought I was dreaming.” There was more emotion to his voice than Charlotte had ever heard before. “Our conversation, our interests, your sense of humor, everything was perfect. Then Brian walked up and I realized you were his. I wanted to die.”

Charlotte’s breath caught. Was it possible that Jack liked her
back then? She had never imagined he might, had always taken his aloofness for distaste. “I thought maybe you would see me too,” he added. “But you were so wrapped up in Brian the Great, you never even noticed.”

That’s not true, she wanted to say. Well, partially it was—she had been young and consumed with Brian. And Jack had terrified her in a way she could only understand now, with experience and the passage of years, that had in fact been born out of raw attraction. But remembering, it seemed so clear—how her throat seemed to seize whenever he entered a room, making it difficult to speak or breathe, the way she’d found it unbearable to be alone with him.

Later that night she’d been unable to sleep and had slipped from the guest room out onto the terrace into the cool evening air. It was a clear night and the sky, unmarred by the city lights, was a carpet of stars, dancing above the water. She craned her neck upward, so engrossed that it was several minutes before she heard a scratching sound and realized that she was not alone. Jack sat in a lawn chair a few feet away, also gazing upward.

“Oh!” she said, and his eyes dropped, meeting hers. Bathed in moonlight, he seemed almost mythic. Neither spoke for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, she had turned and fled back into the house, heart pounding.

He continued, drawing her from her memories. “And now you turn up here out of the blue after all these years, and I think, maybe it’s fate, or at least it could be if I believed in fate. But you still look at him like that.” She wanted to protest, but found that she could not. “Not that I deserve anything good in my life after the mistakes I’ve made and the things I’ve done.” He cleared his throat. “But I won’t stand here and watch him hurt you again.”

She understood even more clearly then why Jack had been so aloof all those years ago and why he’d been so prickly since she’d
arrived, even going so far as to deny his feelings for her. He’d been destroyed once by the baroness and Charlotte was the one person who could hurt him again—if he let her get that close.

“Jack—” She wanted to tell him it wasn’t like that, that she knew the kind of pain he’d suffered and the fear of letting it happen again, that her feelings for Brian were all in the past and that she would not hurt him if given the chance.

But before she could continue, Brian reappeared at the table. “Another round?” he asked, as if he and Jack had not clashed, his bravado amplified by the liquor.

She shook her head, overwhelmed by it all. “I’m going to turn in.”

“Then I guess I will too.” Brian summoned the waiter and signed the check. Charlotte looked at Jack but he stared at his glass, seemingly miles away. She did not want to risk leaving him here alone, fearful he might take a sip of the now-watery drink. But a moment later he stood and followed them back out the hotel lobby.