The Things We Cherished (32 page)

Anneke made her way through the darkened streets, moving as swiftly as she could until she reached the munitions factory. Deserted since the end of the war, it was a hulking shell, crumbling stovepipes pointing forlornly upward, gaping holes where the windows had once been. She approached the main gate as Henryk had indicated, but there was no sign of him. She was a few minutes late, but surely Henryk would have waited. Perhaps he had been delayed as well.

She kept close to the munitions factory, trying to stay hidden in the shadows. Then she looked across at the mass of barbed wire and steel that now separated East from West. She shivered, taking in the makeshift tower that had been erected, bright lights shining down on the work site below.

At the corner, she glimpsed a police car, creeping slowly. She
kept moving, circling the block so as not to arouse suspicion. As she walked, she recalled her conversation with her mother. It was a familiar one, Bronia blaming Anneke for ruining her life. But something she had said tonight was different: “I never should have taken you.” What had she meant by that? Anneke shrugged off the question. Bronia was drunk, talking nonsense as always.

She returned to the specified meeting spot. Half an hour had passed at least and Henryk was still not there. She wondered if he was all right, whether someone had learned of his plan to flee. She started down the street, then stopped again. Where was she going? It was too late to go to the bar and ask Henryk’s friends about his whereabouts. She did not know where Henryk lived, and she would not dare to go there even if she did. She thought of the flat where they had spent their lone night together. There was no reason to think he would necessarily be there, but she had to try something.

Twenty minutes later she reached the apartment block by the station. As she climbed the stairs to the flat, the dank odor brought back a wave of memories of the night they had shared. She reached the door and raised her hand to knock, then stopped. From inside came Henryk’s low voice, then the familiar tinkling laugh of the girl from the café.

An icy hand seemed to grip her by the throat. Henryk had betrayed her. Of course he had never promised her anything, but their plans to leave together, the dream that they shared, suggested more. She stood motionless, uncertain what to do. Every instinct in her being told her to go inside and confront him, to demand the truth.

Paris, she thought, and suddenly the images of her new life began to slip from her mind. She pulled them back again. Over the past few days the dream had grown to be about something more than Henryk, something bigger. It had become her own, the first
that she’d ever dared to have. If she confronted him now and they parted badly, he would leave her behind.

Go with him anyway, a voice inside her urged. Her other self protested: to say nothing about his betrayal and act as if she didn’t know would be to live a lie. But once he had gotten her to Paris, she would no longer need him. She could set out on her own and make a life there. Quietly she started back down the stairs, feeling about ten years older than she had a few minutes earlier.

On the last step she stumbled, and the banging of her shoes as she recovered echoed through the stairway. Above a door opened and she heard footsteps. “Anneke,” Henryk said breathlessly, appearing on the landing above.

The top three buttons of his shirt were undone, she noticed as he walked down the stairs toward her. She bit her lip, fighting the urge to demand answers about the girl. “I went to the Wall, but you didn’t show,” she said. “So I came looking for you here.” Why did she feel the need to justify her actions after what he had done?

“I was running late,” he replied, and the explanation was so inadequate she almost laughed aloud.

“We should go,” she said, focusing on Paris and all of the things that lay ahead. “Are you ready now?”

He looked away. “Anneke,” he repeated and his breathing was calmer now, his tone solemn.

“What is it?”

“I can’t.”

Her feet seemed to slip from beneath her and she leaned against the wall so as not topple. “My father, he found out and he’s stopping me—”

“In a few weeks then, maybe,” she said stubbornly. “After he’s no longer watching.” But even as she spoke she knew that there was more to it than that.

“It’s not just that. My friend,” she could tell instantly from the catch in his voice that he was not talking about one of the other boys from the café but of the dark-haired girl in the flat. “My friend thinks I should return to the university and my father has offered to pay my living expenses if I start this term.”

He continued speaking, but she could barely hear him over the buzzing in her ears. “I’m sorry, Anneke.” She watched in disbelief as he turned and started to climb the stairs. She wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t made her way to the flat. Would he have even bothered to leave the company of the dark-haired girl to come and tell Anneke he wasn’t going, or would she still be standing alone on the darkened street corner waiting?

What now? She could dump the clock and go home and act as though nothing had happened. But it was too late for that. She found herself thinking of Scarlett O’Hara—what would her favorite heroine have done in this situation?

Go anyway, a voice not her own seemed to say. She hesitated, taken aback by the idea. Well, why not? She could make her way to the break in the Wall. She didn’t have Henryk’s contacts on the other side, but she would manage somehow.

“Wait,” she called after him. He turned back reluctantly. “How—I mean, if one was going to go?”

A look of disbelief crossed his face and for a moment she thought he might refuse to give her the information. But then his expression turned to resignation. “Down the street from the munitions factory, about a quarter mile south across from a butcher shop there’s a gap in the Wall. If you can get over, there’s a van that passes by that can take you out of the city for a price.”

“But the area by the munitions factory is a huge construction site. There are lights, hundreds of workers.”

“It’s nearly impossible,” he conceded with a detachment that
confirmed the mission was no longer his own. “But perhaps farther down it won’t be so conspicuous.” She glimpsed fear in his eyes then and knew that his decision not to go had nothing to do with returning to the university.

This time, she did not wait for him to turn away. “Good-bye, Henryk,” she said, taking in his shrunken form. The breath beneath her words seemed to extinguish the last tiny flicker of what she had felt for him.

She walked from the building and started down the street, moving as swiftly as she could while carrying the rucksack. She didn’t know what time the van would pass by, but she had surely been delayed from Henryk’s original timetable by the detour to the flat. She looked over her shoulder, wondering if she should go back and ask. But there was no time and this was her journey now.

When she reached the Wall, she continued down the street, finding the butcher shop he had referenced. She looked at the Wall across from it but it appeared solid. Her heart sank. Had Henryk been misinformed?

Then a few feet down the road she saw it, a gap in the Wall where the concrete was missing—whether it had been broken or was not filled in yet she did not know—and a tangle of thick barbed wire was all that remained. She hurried to it. Closer now, she could see that it was hardly the break Henryk had been promised—a notch, cut out of the top of the Wall, not more than ten inches wide. It was several feet off the ground, and she had to find a foothold to reach it. How much easier it would have been if there had been two of them, one hoisted over first who could then reach back to help the other. A pang of regret shot through her. But there was no time to think about that now.

Taking a deep breath, she reached up and secured one foot in a small niche in the Wall. She looked at her rucksack, hesitating.
It would be hard enough to climb over with two hands, much less with one tied up holding the bag. But she did not dare throw it over for fear of damaging the clock. She climbed up into the crevice, sliding one leg over the Wall, grimacing as she felt her tights rip. On the other side, there was a wide chasm, separating east from west. In that moment, she understood for the first time the distance she had to travel, the difficulty of the road ahead.

A light shone up at her suddenly. “Halt!” The police, she panicked. How had they found her so quickly? Had Henryk told? No, there would have been nothing in it for him. Perhaps he had shared his plan with the girl at the flat, or maybe Bronia had become suspicious and summoned her government friend.

She struggled without success to pull her other leg over but she was stuck in the crevice, unable to move. A shot rang out and a bullet whizzed past, missing her shoulder by inches. They really meant to stop her at any cost. Desperately, she tugged herself loose, hurling herself toward the other side. There was another shot and something struck her, sending her lurching forward. I’m hit, she realized, though she felt no pain. She gave another tug and, still clutching the bag, fell into the darkness below.

LAKE COMO
,
2009

“So she’s a nun?” Charlotte asked a few hours later as the car raced south toward the Swiss–Italian border. She tried not to watch the road or notice the speed with which Brian pushed the rented Fiat around the terrifying alpine curves.

Brian nodded, not taking his eyes from the road. “Her name is Anastasia Darien, and she’s at a convent just south of Lake Como.”

“Did she say what she knew?” Charlotte pressed, for what seemed like the tenth time.

“No, like I told you, just that she had information that might help with Roger’s defense.”

“And she wouldn’t discuss it over the phone?” Jack asked from the backseat.

Brian raised an eyebrow in the rearview mirror. “Would we be driving all night if she had?”

“True,” Jack relented. At the sound of his voice, conflict washed over Charlotte. She half wished she was sitting in the back with him, watching his profile, close enough to feel his warmth. Partly, though, she was relieved—their last conversation, interrupted by Brian, had not ended well. She didn’t want to see a different look
in his eyes than the one that had given her butterflies every time he had glanced her way for the past several days.

“Of course, she could just be a complete fraud,” Jack added grimly. After Brian had come to Charlotte excitedly with the news, they’d called Jack, who returned quickly to the hotel. Despite the late hour, he had on the same clothes he was wearing earlier and Charlotte had wondered if he’d ever gone to bed. At the door to her room, he’d hesitated and she knew he was thinking of their night together.

Jack had been the most skeptical of the three about making the trek to Italy, and Charlotte had braced herself for a repeat of the debate over whether to travel to Salzburg. But things were different now—with Roger defeated by the news of Magda’s death, there were few other leads to pursue, so Jack had quickly acquiesced to the trip. But now his cynicism seemed to return. “We get phone calls like that all the time, false tips.”

Brian shifted gears as they descended a hill. “To what end?”

Charlotte could hear the shrug in Jack’s voice. “Attention seekers, mostly. People read about a high-profile case in the paper and they want to be part of it. Or they think there’s some sort of money involved, like a reward.”

“Well, we’ll find out soon enough,” Brian replied, as they neared the border crossing. A guard stuck his head out of a small building and waved them through. On the other side, the terrain became steeper and the sky paled slightly behind them in a way that suggested morning was near.

They traveled in silence for some time, the predawn hush broken only by the whirring of the engine. Finally, they climbed another peak and as they cleared a cluster of trees, daylight broke, revealing a valley below. “That’s it,” Brian announced, pointing.

Even shrouded in dimness, the view was breathtaking. Kaletni
Monastery sat nestled in a bluff covered with brightly colored autumn leaves, overlooking a massive expanse of water. It was a large medieval structure, a red-roofed chapel surrounded by a series of smaller buildings with arched windows hewn crudely from sandstone.