by Pam Jenoff
Unable to look away, she forced herself to continue reading. And somewhere between learning that Brian’s grandfather had been CEO of a Fortune 250 company and that the bride would be keeping her name, she felt a sudden sense of release, like the air being let out of a balloon. She was relieved to have been excused from a world where she did not belong, a student given permission to change majors or drop a class that was too hard.
Giving up the rest was easy after that, and she turned down the fellowship to The Hague that she had been scheduled to start after graduation. Instead, she applied for and got the public defender position, returning to Philadelphia and slipping into the city like a pair of comfy old shoes.
That night at five minutes to six, Charlotte stepped out of a cab at Third and Chestnut and glanced down the street in both directions. Old City, once the province of Ben Franklin and the Founding Fathers, was now Philadelphia’s version of trendy and she seldom ventured down to the endless rows of hip bars and restaurants that maligned the Federalist architecture of the neighborhood. Two blocks west, laughter spilled over from the throngs of tourists departing Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell as they boarded their motor coaches for home. A swath of parkland across the street sat in improbable late-day stillness, sunlight slatting through the crisp leaves.
Charlotte paused, wishing she’d been able to override her normal tendencies and arrive casually late. For a minute she considered circling the block, stalling for time to compose herself. But there was no point in delaying the inevitable—the sooner she met with Brian, the sooner she could put him and his devilish green eyes back on that train to New York.
As she approached the restaurant, she studied her reflection in the glass window of an adjacent store, smoothing her shoulder-length brown hair. There hadn’t been time to go home—the modest Queen Village townhouse she’d bought before the neighborhood had become fashionable was a thirty-five-minute walk from the office, pleasant enough on a nice day, but too far in the wrong direction to make it before dinner. So after work she had stopped in Macy’s, the city’s one surviving department store. Resisting the urge to buy a new outfit entirely, she settled instead for a crème silk blouse to replace the knit top she’d worn previously under her suit and some makeup and perfume from samples at the Clinique counter.
Inside, Charlotte lingered uncertainly by the reservation desk, adjusting her eyes to the dimmer lighting. The Asian fusion restaurant was a cavernous sea of tables, walls draped in red silk, a massive gold Buddha statue dominating one side of the room. A dozen or more chefs bustled behind clouds of steam in the open kitchen to the rear. At the bar to the left, young twentysomethings tried to impress one another over brightly colored ten-dollar cocktails.
“Can I help you?” the hostess asked without interest. Charlotte did not answer but scanned the room, spotting Brian at a table to the rear. That was unexpected; early was not his style, the notion of waiting for others unpalatable to him. As she approached, he stood, hurriedly tucking a BlackBerry into his jacket pocket.
“Thanks for joining me,” he said, sounding like he meant it.
She studied the menu the waitress handed her as she sat, grateful for the reprieve. “Grey Goose martini, up, extra olives,” she said. She did not usually drink hard liquor on a work night, but the circumstances called for an exception.
“Same,” he said, surprising her again. Brian was strictly a beer drinker, or had been anyway.
“So you’re in town for a case?” she asked when the waitress had returned with their drinks and taken their dinner order, a lobster pad thai for her, sesame tuna for him. He did not, she noticed, order an appetizer, further evidence of his hurry to get back to New York and Danielle. Pain stabbed at her stomach as she relived the rejection of a decade ago all over again. But she had not asked for this meeting, she reminded herself; he wanted to see her. “Depositions?” She was suddenly aware of her own Philadelphia accent, the way she seemed to have gone vocally native again in the years since she had returned.
“Just passing through,” he replied, his own pronunciation devoid of geographical markings. “I had a meeting in Washington this morning.” He was usually so precise, but there was a vagueness now to his words that made her wonder if he was telling the truth. Had he come down from New York just to speak with her?
“How have you been?” he asked, and if the question was just a pleasantry, a necessary step to get where he wanted to go, he gave no indication—his face and voice conveyed genuine curiosity. He had always had the ability to make anyone think he was on their side, sincerely concerned with their best interests—which was exactly what made him so dangerous. She had not suspected anything was wrong, until the very moment he told her he was leaving for someone else.
“Great,” she replied, a beat too quickly. She suddenly felt naked, exposed. “I’m working with juveniles …” She almost tuned herself out as she rattled on, wearing her job like a cloak. But the work, about which she was usually so passionate, sounded provincial, unsophisticated. “And you?”
“Fine. I just came off a two-month securities trial and we, that is, Dani …” He hesitated, as though for a moment he had forgotten the impropriety of speaking about his wife to the woman he had left for her. As though Charlotte were anyone. “Anyway, a vacation would be nice. Maybe Aspen.”
Charlotte imagined the two of them swooshing through the powder in perfect unison. She had always been a train wreck on skis, a menace to herself and those around her. “But then this new matter came up,” he added, as she took a large swallow of her drink, steeling herself. “That’s why I wanted to see you.”
“Me?” she blurted out, louder than intended, nearly choking on the liquid. Brian was a securities litigator, defending lawsuits for the biggest brokerage houses in the country. What kind of matter could he possibly want to discuss with her?
He took a sip of martini, grimacing. “It’s a pro bono matter.”
Charlotte faltered, caught off guard. Pro bono work had never been Brian’s thing—he had empathy for the less fortunate on an abstract, policy level, a sort of noblesse oblige inherent in his liberal, upper-class background. But he couldn’t deal with the messiness that surrounded the actual clientele, the ambiguity of the individual cases. What had he gotten himself into now? It must be something high profile, she decided, a death penalty case, perhaps. Her annoyance rose. Firms were taking those on with increasing frequency because of the good press that usually ensued. But despite their resources, they were ill equipped to handle matters requiring such specialized expertise. And now he was here asking her for free advice.
The waitress returned to the table and set a plate in front of Brian. The food was served family-style, Charlotte recalled from her one previous visit, which seemed code for we-bring-out-whatever-we-want-whenever-we-feel-like-it. She shook her head as he gestured toward the plate, offering her some. “Go ahead and eat.”
She expected him to reach for his fork and tear into the meal with the gusto she remembered, but he did not. “Have you ever heard of Roger Dykmans?” he asked instead.
She repeated the name inwardly. “I don’t know. The last name, maybe.”
“Roger is a securities client of mine. His brother was Hans Dykmans.”
Hans Dykmans. The full name sparked immediate recognition. “The diplomat?” Hans Dykmans, like Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and German industrialist Oskar Schindler, had been credited with saving thousands of Jews during the Holocaust. Like Wallenberg, he was arrested and disappeared mysteriously toward the end of the war.
“Yes. Roger is Hans’s younger brother and the head of a major international brokerage house. Only now he’s been arrested and charged as a war criminal for allegedly helping the Germans.” Brian paused, watching Charlotte’s face for a reaction to the possibility that the brother of a war hero might have been a Nazi collaborator. But she was not as surprised as he might have expected. She had learned years ago that the extreme circumstances of the war provok
ed a wide spectrum of reactions, even in the closest of families.
Brian waited until the server put Charlotte’s plate down in front of her before continuing. “Recently, historians uncovered some papers that seem to implicate Roger. They claim he sold out his brother during the war, and that as a result, Hans was arrested and several hundred Jewish children he was trying to save were killed.”
Staring down at the scarlet tablecloth, Charlotte recoiled. She herself was the descendant of Holocaust survivors, or more accurately, one survivor. Her mother had escaped Hungary as a child, sent on a kindertransport to London and later to relatives in America. But the rest of her mother’s family, her parents and brothers, had all perished in the camps. Many times in Winnie’s lonely final days, Charlotte had wondered how different her life might have been had her mother grown up surrounded by a loving family, rather than distant cousins who took her in out of obligation. Their coolness, Charlotte suspected, was what had sent her mother flying into the arms of the first man who ever glanced her way, and who would quickly break her heart, leaving her pregnant and alone.
She looked up at Brian, who was watching her expectantly, waiting for some kind of response. “So Dykmans is a Nazi collaborator,” she said finally. “And you’re trying to defend him.”
“Accused collaborator.” He shrugged, taking a bite of his tuna. “He’s my client. I was asked by the partnership to take on the matter.”
“And you’re here for my help,” she concluded, irritated. Did Brian not remember her family history or simply not care what the nature of his request would mean to her? “Why me?”
Brian blinked several times, as though not accustomed to such bluntness. Of course not. He had spent the intervening years traveling in the social circles of the eternally polite, practicing the formalities of large-firm conference rooms and cocktail parties that made Charlotte want to scream and crawl out of her skin. He had not lived in the rough-and-tumble inner-city court system, where no one had time for niceties or the inclination to be circumspect. “Well,” he began slowly. “Because of your background, for one thing.”
She nodded, then looked over her shoulder, as though someone might overhear. The fact that she’d been a doctoral student in history before turning to the law, though not exactly a secret, was not something she had shared with anyone in Philadelphia. She had spent three years in Eastern Europe on a Fulbright and other fellowships, researching the Holocaust. Her work, focusing on issues that had arisen after the war, like restitution of Jewish property and preservation of the concentration camps, was groundbreaking at the time, and she’d published some articles that had garnered a small amount of notoriety—not to mention a circle of valuable contacts. Originally, she had gone to law school planning to combine her interest in foreign affairs with a legal career, but then Winnie’s death and Brian’s betrayal came crashing down on her. So she’d applied for the position with the defender’s office in Philadelphia, omitting any mention of her Holocaust work because no one here would have cared, much less believed she was seriously interested in a low-paying, public-interest job with those credentials.
“But it’s more than that really,” Brian hastened to add. “I mean, I’ve got the firm’s resources. I can hire the world’s top experts, get anyone I need on the phone. We have two former cabinet members who are of counsel, for Christ’s sake.” He lowered his head and laced his hands behind it, then leaned back. “But your forensic skills are so goddamned good, always were.”
She had forgotten his propensity to swear nonstop when making a point. He thought it gave him a certain machismo, made him seem tough, one of the boys. But to her it always felt forced and indicative of a certain lack of creativity. “Remember the Dukovic case?” he asked.
She nodded. Dukovic had been a Bosnian war criminal, accused of the murder of dozens of Croats. At the last minute, the lone witness against him, a twelve-year-old girl who had managed to survive months of imprisonment, torture, and rape, became too afraid to testify. It looked like Dukovic would walk for lack of evidence. But Charlotte had spent days poring over the documents, piecing together a way to link him to the atrocities through circumstantial evidence—and she finally persuaded the girl to testify. Dukovic was sentenced to a lifetime in prison.
“And you care,” he added. “I mean, look where you are.” He gestured around the restaurant, but she knew he did not mean Buddakan literally. He was talking about the grittiness of her job, the fact that she was down in the trenches fighting for people who had little. “You care that people get a good defense, that innocents are not wrongfully convicted.”
But Dykmans is nothing like my clients, she thought. He’s a wealthy man with resources. “Where’s he being held?”
“Germany.”
“I didn’t think the Germans were pursuing their war crimes cases.”
“They weren’t, until about a year ago. But the Wiesenthal Center and the Department of Justice called them out on it until the pressure became too much.”
“I wish I could help you—” she said, starting to demur.
But Brian raised his hand, interrupting. “An old man is going to jail for the rest of his life,” he said, eyes wide. “He deserves a fair trial.”
Charlotte’s exasperation bubbled over to anger. Did Brian think it was that easy, that if he played on her sense of justice she would simply capitulate to his will? It was as if he viewed her compassion as a weakness to be exploited. Brian’s words echoed back at her: a fair trial. I’ve got a dozen kids sitting in jail across town who won’t get that much, she wanted to say. But he wouldn’t understand.
“What is it that you want me to do?” she asked instead. “I mean, I’m hardly qualified to try the case in Germany.”
“Of course not. We’ve got the best firm in Europe handling that.” An expression that Charlotte could not decipher passed across Brian’s face, then disappeared. “No, what I’m looking for are your forensic skills. We need help figuring out what we’re missing, what Dykmans isn’t telling us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He won’t talk to us.”
“You mean he won’t cooperate in his own defense?” Brian nodded. “So he admits to doing it?”
“No, he just won’t say that he didn’t, or help us find any evidence to prove that.”
Because he doesn’t want to incriminate himself, Charlotte thought. She started to ask whether Brian thought Dykmans was innocent. Then, her defender’s instincts returning, she decided against it.
“Why do you care so much anyway?” she asked instead, raising her hand as Brian opened his mouth. “And don’t give me another truth-and-justice speech. I want the real story.”
An indignant look crossed his face and she expected him to protest that this was all for the greater good. Then his expression seemed to crumble. She had always been able to break through his veneer in a way that no one else (not even his wife, she suspected) could. “It’s about the partnership,” he said finally in a low voice.
Of course, she thought, as the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. Brian was almost nine years into practice, right about the time when he would be considered for partner. “Dykmans is a major client,” he continued. “I’ve basically been told that if I can get him acquitted, I’ll make it. And if not …”
He did not have to finish the sentence. Associates who did not make partner at the big firms had a limited shelf life of a year, maybe two. Then they were expected to go in-house to a company or find something else to do, all less promising options that were surely unthinkable to Brian.
She scooped up some of the pad thai with her chopsticks and popped it in her mouth, chewing as she considered. The whole scenario was utterly surreal. Brian needed her help defending a Nazi collaborator. Accused Nazi collaborator. Not that there was anything personal or particularly flattering about it. He had come to her because she was, quite simply, the person who had what he needed, like a plumber when the toilet was stopped up or a
mechanic for a broken-down car.
But the real question still lay unasked and unanswered. Why should she do it? Brian had broken her heart, taken everything from her. She owed him nothing.
Yet even as she prepared to deny his request, something in her stirred. She remembered her days in the dusty European archives, trying to piece together what had happened, bring some justice to those who could no longer speak for themselves. She’d loved the subject matter, but had been frustrated by its remote, abstract nature. Working on the Dykmans matter might finally be the chance to bring together her international and legal interests, in the way she’d hoped a decade earlier. Her interest was piqued. “I have some vacation coming up,” she said finally. “I can schedule it next month and then—”
“That won’t work,” he interjected, cutting her off in a manner just short of rude. “Roger’s trial is in four weeks. We need to find the evidence to clear him and we need to do it now.”
Her chopsticks clattered to the plate. “Four weeks?” Four weeks out they should be polishing their witnesses, practicing arguments in a mock trial—not searching for evidence.
“I know. It’s far from ideal.” She watched him, waiting for an explanation as to the last-minute nature of his request, but he looked back, unblinking and silent.
So he expected her to drop everything in her life and come running. “I can’t.”
“Dykmans is a wealthy man. You can name your price.”
Charlotte hesitated. It had not occurred to her to ask for money. “I want Kate Dolgenos.”
“Excuse me?” It was clearly not the response he’d anticipated.
“She’s the best criminal defense attorney in your firm, right?” And in the country, she thought, as Brian nodded. “I want her to come down and handle the preliminary hearing for one of my clients next week. It’s a juvenile felony case.” It was the only way she could bring herself to leave Marquan—to place him in the hands of someone better.