The Good Fight

by Danielle Steel

  “Do you have any proof? Messages? Letters? Memos?”

  Angela shook her head. “Nothing I could prove. They’re too smart for that, but they know what they’ve been doing. I want to nail them.”

  Meredith nodded. The woman sounded angry and bitter.

  “I was a lingerie model when I was in school, to pay the bills. I’m thirty-two and single. Basically, they lied to me and never gave me what they promised.”

  Meredith listened carefully and made notes. She heard it from women all the time, white and black. “I’d like to go after them with guns blazing for discrimination, both race and gender, and scare the shit out of them. And then settle the case for you for a nice chunk of money,” Meredith said calmly. “It usually works.”

  “And what do you get?” Angela asked with interest.

  “An hourly fee. I don’t do contingency. I’m not an ambulance chaser. You get a nice settlement, and I get a reputation for doing a good job for my clients, and my fee. That works for me.”

  She told her the hourly rate and Angela didn’t find it exorbitant. She stuck out a hand to shake Merrie’s. She wasn’t a warm person, but businesslike and clear about what she wanted. Money. As much as she could get. “You’ve got a deal, counselor.”

  “Thank you.” Meredith smiled at her. “Let’s meet tomorrow and go over the details. I can file the suit by the end of the week, and then we can watch them dance a little. See you tomorrow. Ten-thirty?” she said.

  Angela nodded and left a few minutes later. Meredith thought she would be a solid client. She was smart, direct, and seemed honest. At least she hoped she was. It sounded like they had a good case. With her case and Claudia’s she would have her hands full, and she had a few others percolating at the moment. Her practice was going well. She described the case to Charlie when he came back from the post office.

  “She looks tough,” he commented, “and ambitious.”

  “She’d have to be, to be a black female lawyer on Wall Street.”

  Angela came back the next day, and they spent two hours together building her case. She was efficient and intelligent, and somewhat ruthless, but Meredith didn’t mind. What she had said to Charlie was accurate. Angela had to be tough in her shoes.

  True to her word, Meredith filed the lawsuit on Friday. And the press had picked it up by Monday. It was a good story, especially since Angela was represented by the granddaughter of a previous and greatly respected Supreme Court justice and the daughter of a sitting federal judge. Her name had resonated immediately as the attorney on the complaint and caught the attention of the press.

  Angela called and said she was very pleased. Her previous employer had called her and left messages pleading for her to reconsider, but she wasn’t taking their calls.

  “Let them sit for a while,” Meredith warned her.

  When Meredith got back to her apartment that night, her father called her. He chatted inanely for a while, which wasn’t like him, and then said he had a favor to ask.

  “Sure, Dad, what?” She was closer to him now since her brother’s death, and their war protest together.

  “I think you took on a case recently. The plaintiff is a young black woman. The defendants are Elkins, Stein and Hammersmith. Larry Elkins and Bert Hammersmith are old friends of mine. And they’d like you to do them a favor.”

  “They want to pay us a big settlement so we drop the case? We’d love it,” she said playfully.

  “Actually, to be honest, they’d like you to get off the case. I think they’re afraid you’ll do too good a job, and your being attached to it excites the press.”

  “Very flattering, but I’m not ditching my client.”

  “This could be embarrassing for me. They asked me to call you and convince you, if I could.”

  “I don’t do favors like that, Dad. I’m an attorney, not a bookie. She’s my client and she has a good case.”

  “That’s what they’re worried about. It seems she slipped through the cracks. It’s a big firm and they passed over her a number of times, unintentionally of course.”

  “They should have thought of that before they let her go and replaced her with someone’s white niece and paid her more money than my client got after three years. It’s a clear-cut discrimination case, Dad. They’re in the wrong here.”

  “This could be very awkward because of her color.”

  “Precisely. We’ll be happy to accept a big settlement and all will be forgiven. It’s what my client deserves. Now what else can I do for you?”

  He sounded flustered and a few minutes later asked her when she was coming for dinner. And the next morning, the settlement offers started rolling in.

  It took her six weeks to get a final settlement for Angela. She got the equivalent of a year’s wages and an apology, so she didn’t report them to the NAACP for the press value, which Meredith had threatened to do. Angela was very happy with the result, but Meredith had another idea. She had liked working with her. Angela was smart and to the point, businesslike, and professional. She was well educated too.

  “How would you like to work with me? I’m thinking of taking on an associate and another paralegal or assistant. What do you think? No Wall Street politics or games. I’m a straight shooter and I think you are too. Does that appeal to you at all?”

  “Yeah, actually it does. People are going to be afraid to hire me now after I threatened a lawsuit. I need to let things cool for a while.”

  “I hope you stay. With me, what you see is what you get,” Meredith said openly.

  “That works.”

  Meredith quoted her a fair salary and Angela said she liked it. Half an hour later, she left Merrie’s office. She had a new job and a nice fat settlement, and Merrie had a new associate. She had to hire a second paralegal, but thought that would be easy. And she loved Charlie. He proved his worth every day, and she trusted him completely. He made excellent decisions, and suggestions about her cases.

  Her father called her that afternoon and told her she had done a good job with Angela’s case.

  “We got a good settlement.” She was pleased.

  “They were afraid of worse. What you asked for was fair.”

  “Damn, I should have asked for more,” she teased him. But she wanted to be respected, not hated. She was satisfied. And Angela was too.

  The second paralegal she hired wasn’t as impressive as Charles, and she was a little unsure of herself, but Meredith had the feeling she’d try hard. Her name was Peggy. She was in her late forties, and very anxious to please.

  Meredith split her backlog of smaller cases with Angela once she started working.

  Then Meredith got what she’d been waiting for. She smiled when she opened the letter.

  “You look like you just won the lottery,” Charlie said to her when he walked into her office to ask a question.

  “I think I did. I’m going to Germany on a restitution case in January,” she said, waving the letter.

  “Will you need a translator?” He was curious.

  “Nope. I’m fluent in German, and so is my client. I spent four years there as a kid.”

  “Impressive.” Angela had walked in and heard what Meredith said. She admired her a lot. She was working on two small termination cases Meredith had given her. Meredith liked her better and better. She was just what she needed, and she was a hard worker.

  She could hardly wait to tell Claudia that the committee in West Berlin had agreed to meet with them there on their turf. Whether Claudia wanted to or not, as far as Meredith was concerned, come hell or high water, they were going.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Claudia and Meredith’s plane to Geneva took off from New York in January right after New Year. Both women had decided to treat themselves to first class seats since they were taking the night flight and had to take a second flight
from Geneva to West Berlin. They had to meet with the Restitution Committee in West Berlin the same afternoon. Claudia didn’t want to be away from the children for too long, and she was still nervous about being in Germany. She had no idea how it would feel to be back after almost twenty-one years. Her last glimpse of Germany had been from the plane on her way to America, after being liberated from Auschwitz. She had been a terrified child then, an orphan, on her way to a family to adopt her. Now she was a grown woman, with a husband and children of her own.

  As they flew over Berlin, they could see the ominous Berlin Wall snaking its way through the city, separating east from west, and surrounding West Berlin. When they landed at Berlin Tegel Airport, a car was waiting for them. Meredith had arranged everything. She wanted to make the trip as easy as possible for her friend. She knew how much Claudia didn’t want to be there, and how traumatic it was for her. Claudia was silent on the way into the city, and they were staying at the Kempinski Hotel Bristol. Claudia sat looking out the window at the remaining familiar landmarks of her childhood, and remembered them all. The Restitution Committee was at the Rathaus Schöneberg, the city hall for West Berlin, which had been handling the restitution cases since the war. Most claims were either about architecture or art, when houses were involved. And financial issues were handled by the Bundesbank, where they had kept careful records of the Jewish bank accounts that were seized, many of which were still being held because they belonged to people who had died during the war. What hadn’t been stolen by the Nazis had been frozen ever since. There were similar accounts in Switzerland that had never been claimed.

  Meredith was planning to hand over a copy of their entire file, and discuss with them what they were willing to validate. Meredith had managed to find photographs of Claudia’s parents’ homes. One was a hotel now, another was a museum, and the third one, the schloss, was privately owned by a Bavarian prince.

  “Are you okay?” she asked Claudia, who nodded. She followed Meredith silently as they walked into the Kempinski Hotel. She couldn’t speak, she was so unnerved just being in Berlin.

  They had agreed to share a room, since they had splurged on the air tickets, and Claudia was happy not to be alone. It had seemed strange listening to everyone speak German around her, and she and Meredith lapsed into English as they walked into the room.

  They ordered breakfast and afterward decided to go for a walk. They walked down the Kurfürstendamm and glanced at the shops, and Claudia remembered shopping there with her mother as a child. She was six when she was hidden by friends, and seven when she was sent to the camps, so all her memories were from before that, as a very young child. But they were vivid even now. And she felt like a child again as she walked along, steeped in memories with Meredith at her side. And then unable to resist it, drawn to it inexorably, they hired a car and asked the driver to take them past Claudia’s family house. She got out and stood staring up at it for a long time, with all her memories, and then got back in the car with an anguished expression. Seeing the house had been hard.

  “Does it look the way you remembered?” Meredith asked her gently. She could tell how moved Claudia was. This was a pilgrimage for her into the past.

  “Only a little smaller,” she said, referring to the house, which looked enormous to Merrie. They had lunch at a beer garden before going to the appointment with the committee.

  A woman came out to greet them when they arrived. She looked stiff and stern, introduced herself as Frau Hoffmann, and asked them to follow her. There were five people in the room she led them to, sitting around a table, and all of them looked intently at Claudia as she and Meredith walked in and Frau Hoffmann invited them to sit down.

  “Thank you for coming,” Frau Hoffmann said. They started out politely and Meredith could see a little shiver go down Claudia’s spine. Claudia was trying to remind herself that they weren’t going to hurt her, she wasn’t going to prison, and no one was going to kill her. They weren’t Nazis and she wasn’t a child. But the echoes of the past were very loud in her head as she tried to focus on what they were saying, and she reached for Meredith’s hand and held it tight.

  “I’m sorry, but this is very difficult for me,” she said in a small, tense voice. “I didn’t want to come, but Miss McKenzie said that you would not validate my claim if I didn’t come in person. I never wanted to come back to Germany again,” she said, shaking visibly and speaking carefully to them. She didn’t want to offend them.

  “We understand,” Frau Hoffmann said, and pulled the file toward her, looking serious and official, sitting up very straight. She leafed through it carefully, stopping at the photographs of her parents’ houses. She had seen parts of the file before. “And you wish restitution for all of this?” she asked Claudia, who didn’t answer for a minute. “Why did you wait so long?” Her eyes met Claudia’s directly.

  “At first, I didn’t know that I could get restitution. Now I only want what is right for my children. I realize that much of it will never be recovered, and can’t be proven now. I was a child then and there is no record of what we had. But the homes were ours, that’s a known fact, and many important paintings, and my mother’s jewelry that’s hard to trace, and all the money they had. The Nazis took everything from us, and killed my two sisters, my brother and my parents, and my grandparents. I don’t even know how I will explain it to my children one day, that something like that could happen.”

  “It was a terrible time for Germany,” Frau Hoffmann said drily, as though it absolved them.

  “And for us,” Claudia corrected her. “Have others been able to get restitution?” Claudia asked. She knew they had, but not in what amounts.

  “Some,” the woman said honestly. “But not many. And not on this scale. So much was lost during and after the war.”

  “And so many people during the war,” Claudia persisted.

  “It’s a miracle that you lived through it,” one of the men said more gently. “You were so young.” Claudia nodded. He looked sympathetic and sad for her.

  “I was seven when they sent me to Auschwitz, and ten when the Russians liberated the camp.”

  And then they went through the file looking at the pictures, the houses, the art, the schloss, and some photographs that Meredith had found of Claudia’s mother in German newspapers. She had been a very beautiful woman, and her father very handsome.

  Each member of the committee looked at it carefully page by page without comment. They also asked her countless questions about her time in Auschwitz, and the death of her parents and siblings, and after they had been there for three hours, Frau Hoffmann stood up and thanked them for coming, indicating that the interview was over, and led them out of the room again.

  Claudia looked shell-shocked when they were back on the sidewalk, and she stared at Meredith.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Meredith said. “They should tell us in a few months what they’re willing to give you, and we’ll probably have to appeal many times in the next few years. This is just the beginning. But for now, it’s all over.”

  Claudia was visibly relieved, and they went back to the hotel and she lay down on the bed. They were going back to New York in the morning and she didn’t want to leave the hotel room. She was drained.

  “Do you want to go out to dinner tonight?” Meredith asked, and Claudia shook her head.

  “I don’t think I can. I would fall over.” Instead she lay there and fell asleep and woke up several hours later. She wondered if it was crazy to have come. But it couldn’t do any harm. They couldn’t hurt her or take her away again. She had been terrified the whole time she spoke to the committee, and they had awakened all the memories she wanted to forget.

  She hadn’t told the Steinbergs she was coming and was glad she hadn’t. It would have seemed disloyal to them after all they had done for her.

  She didn’t speak to Meredi
th for the rest of the night, and in the morning they dressed and went to the airport. Claudia could only speak again when they were back on the plane. She was shaken but glad she’d come. It felt right, no matter how hard it was.

  “I thought they were going to take me away again,” she said in a shaking voice after they took off.

  “No one’s going to take you away again,” Meredith said gently.

  “It didn’t feel that way in that room. Do you think they’ll give me anything?” she asked. “It would be nice for my children.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You were very brave, and you came, that’s all that counts.” Claudia nodded and fell asleep until they landed in New York. She was absolutely exhausted. Thaddeus was there to meet her with Alex and Sarah in a stroller, and she smiled when she saw them.

  “How was it?” he asked her as soon as they came through customs, and she threw herself into his arms and kissed her babies.

  “Hard. It brought a lot of memories back I thought I had forgotten, and wish I had.”

  Meredith left them at the entrance of the garage and took a cab into the city. The trip had been short but rugged. There had been nothing easy about it, which they had expected.

  She went to Connecticut to talk to Claudia about it that weekend, to make sure she was all right, and was startled to find she had a guest. He was a friend of Thaddeus, and he said he traveled a great deal for work. He was German, in his early forties, and said he spent time in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Germany. He had stopped in New York to talk to Thaddeus about a film about it. His name was Gunther Weiss, and he was interesting to talk to. He had a mane of dark hair and piercing blue eyes.

  “What sort of work do you do?” Meredith asked him, trying to guess but she couldn’t. He was quiet and serious. He said he hunted criminals, which startled her.