“A bounty hunter?”
“Not really. I bring Nazis in hiding to justice. It takes a long time to find them, all over the world. Many have been hidden, with new identities, since the war.” Meredith didn’t know what to say at first. It was a noble task. “I really have no home base,” he said simply. “I travel all the time.”
She told him about her father being part of the Nuremberg war trials, and he was impressed.
“That was just the beginning. Now we must keep going until we find them all, or learn what happened to them, if they died.” It sounded difficult and challenging, and he was fascinating to talk to during dinner. He was knowledgeable on many subjects.
He asked Meredith if she was Jewish and she said she wasn’t. She said that she was a discrimination lawyer, mostly for integration issues, or gender or religious matters. He was on his way to Brazil after the weekend, and said he spent a lot of time there. He and Thaddeus had been friends for years, and he liked Claudia and their children. She wanted to know more about him. But he was a man of mystery, and said very little about himself.
“I was in the camps too,” he said to her quietly after the others went upstairs that night. “I lost everyone, just like Claudia. We’re a small club, the survivors of the camps. Some of us recover, and others never do.” She wondered which one he was, or if she’d ever find out. She wanted to know more about him but doubted she ever would, or even see him again. “I’ve made it my life’s mission to find the men who did it to us.” He wasn’t married, had no children, and seemed to have no home, just as he said.
And in the morning, when they got up, he was gone. Back to Brazil.
“That’s the way he is,” Claudia said. “He’s caught some very important Nazis,” she said admiringly. “It’s all he thinks about and lives for.” Meredith could see that. He had given his whole life to his beliefs. She thought he was the most intriguing man she’d ever met.
“Don’t go falling in love with him,” Claudia warned her.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Meredith said to her friend. “He’s just very interesting to talk to,” she said casually.
“That’s what women always say, and then they fall madly in love with him, because they can’t have him. He never gets attached to anyone. The only thing he cares about is finding the next Nazi and bringing him in. He lives for that. I think he had a girlfriend in the camps who died in his arms. Some people never recover. I was lucky I was young.”
Meredith thought about what she’d said on the train ride back to New York, and, in spite of herself, hoped their paths would cross again. The men she met in her life paled in comparison to him.
* * *
—
They didn’t hear anything further about Claudia’s restitution case for the rest of the year, which seemed like a long time to Meredith. She checked on it regularly, and they told her the Claims Conference had not come to a final decision yet.
Her practice was thriving, and she continued to have a regular flow of small discrimination cases, referred to her by other attorneys. She and Angela worked well together, and Meredith thought about offering her a partnership, but it was too soon. But she definitely had it in mind. At the end of the year, Angela said she had a new boyfriend. She mentioned that he was white, and a partner in an important Wall Street firm. She was out with him every night, but still worked hard. She was unfailingly professional about her job.
And when Meredith had spare time, she went to protests and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Her father hadn’t gone again, but he approved of her position. There were almost five hundred thousand U.S. combat troops in Vietnam by then. And when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at a massive demonstration against the war in April 1967, Meredith went, and to the march on the Pentagon in October. She was walking down the street in Georgetown afterward when she saw a man who looked vaguely familiar, and realized it was Claudia and Thaddeus’s friend, the Nazi hunter, Gunther Weiss. He recognized her too, walked across the street to talk to her, and looked pleased to see her. It had been almost two years since she’d seen him.
“What are you doing here?” he asked her.
“Trying to get arrested,” she said easily, and he laughed.
“I’m here to see friends, I’m going back to Germany tonight. Do you want to have dinner? I’m on a late flight.” It sounded appealing to her, and they walked around the city for a while and then went to her hotel for a drink. And she noticed again what a striking man he was.
“How are you doing on Claudia’s restitution case?” he asked her over their drinks.
“We haven’t heard a word since we went. Maybe they’re going to just ignore us forever. If they start to pay for everything they lost, even just the houses, it will cost them a fortune.”
“They won’t pay that much,” he said firmly, “but they should pay something. They always take a long time.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Same as always.” He smiled at her. “Looking for Nazis and dragging them back to be prosecuted.” He’d had a major find the year before, in Uruguay. Meredith remembered Claudia telling her about it. “What you and I do is not so different. We are always making people accountable for the bad things they do to other people, because they’re black or Jewish or women. It’s a good thing to do.”
“What I do is a lot tamer,” she said, though not always. “And what you do is dangerous. I can’t imagine that the Nazis you find go back willingly.”
“True. I’ve killed a few who tried to shoot me. Mostly they just try to buy me off. A lot of them still have a great deal of the money they stole hidden away. They’re not leading bad lives. Until I find them.” He looked hard as he said it, and his mentioning that he had killed some of them didn’t go unnoticed. There was something disconnected and intensely cold about him, and yet she had seen how gentle he was with Claudia’s children. But he looked like he could take care of himself in any situation. He seemed fearless, even ruthless.
“I like your values,” he said to her over dinner. “We give up a lot for lives like ours,” he continued thoughtfully. He seemed to have no regrets for the life he led. “We pay a high price for it, but I think it’s worth it.”
“So do I,” she said honestly. “I knew when I went to law school that I was making a choice. I’d probably never be married or have children. My grandfather taught me to be a fighter for what I believe in. My parents weren’t too happy about it.”
“And now?” He was curious about her, and had been when they met. There was an unmistakable attaction between them. They were both warriors, who fought to defend others.
She smiled. “I think they’ve given up. I’m turning thirty-one. I think it’s a little late for the kind of life they wanted me to have. And I have an arrest record a mile long, from protests, marches, demonstrations. I think most men would have a little trouble with that,” she said, and they both laughed. She hadn’t had a date in a year, and didn’t think about it, until she met someone like him. Her independence alone scared off most men.
“It only makes you more interesting,” he said easily about her arrest record, which seemed insignificant to him.
“Not to the people I know. I’m a renegade. So was my grandfather. He was the one who convinced me to go after what I believe in.”
“And have you?” He was curious about her, and his blue eyes were mesmerizing.
“Pretty much. I have my own law practice and live by my beliefs. There will always be another battle to fight, for the underdog and the underprivileged, and people who don’t get a fair chance because of the color of their skin, or their religion, or because they’re women. I can’t let those kinds of things go,” she admitted. “I never have, and probably never will.”
“What does your father do?”
“He’s a federal judge, and way more conservative and respectable than I am
.” She smiled.
“Who are your heroes?” he asked, and she thought about it for a minute, but not for long.
“Martin Luther King. John Kennedy. My grandfather. You, maybe, for what you do.”
“I’m not a hero,” Gunther said firmly. “I’m a bad guy with a good excuse. There’s a difference.” It was an intriguing thought. “I’m an angry person with a fire that will never go out until I catch and kill them all.”
“I don’t want to kill anybody,” she said thoughtfully. “I just want to make them do the right thing.”
“Sometimes it’s easier to kill them,” he said honestly. “Some people will never do the right thing.”
“We have to try.”
“What you do is harder. I take them by force.”
“You can’t always do that,” she said quietly, and he nodded.
He looked at his watch at the end of dinner. “I have to go. I have to pick up my bags on the way to the airport. I hope we meet again one day,” he said, smiling at her.
“Call me if you ever come to New York,” she said, wishing he would, and remembering Claudia’s warning that women fell for him constantly and he never got attached. There was something frightening about him and appealing at the same time. He was as tough as the men he hunted. Maybe tougher. For a good cause.
“I will,” he said, and sounded as though he meant it. Just talking to him seemed a little dangerous or even a lot. She sensed that one could get badly hurt if one loved him. “You can take me to a protest march one day. I hate the Vietnam War too. Such needless death.”
“I lost my brother there two years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” he said gently, and they left the restaurant. He hailed a taxi to go to his friends’ home to pick up his bag, and just before he got in the cab, he turned to Meredith and bent to kiss her. He barely touched her lips with his, but the impression was searing, he was so intense. He put a gentle finger to her cheek for an instant with a serious expression, and got into the cab, as she stood watching while it drove away, and then she walked back into her hotel. He was everything Claudia had said. Dangerous, unattainable, exciting, alluring, mysterious, both gentle and fierce, untamed and untamable, and she sensed clearly that even if by chance she did see him again, she would never have him. It was probably just as well. There was something broken deep inside him that only killing Nazis would satisfy. The rest of his life, and the people in it, meant little to him. He was too damaged to even love again. Revenge was all he had left. He was the ultimate freedom fighter, and he was both frightening and appealing all at once.
Chapter Sixteen
Meredith tried not to think of Gunther Weiss after she ran into him in Washington, but he came to mind more than she would have liked. There was something mesmerizing about him. He was the ultimate unattainable man, fighting his wars, hunting down criminals, honoring the past. There was something sexy and romantic about it, but she had a sense now too of how brutal and dangerous he was. It was tempting to want to tame him, but no one ever would. He was too wounded deep within. But spending even an hour with him was tantalizing.
She put him out of mind and forgot him eventually, and when her father took her to lunch a month later, he stunned her with an announcement. He said he was tired, and they both knew that Alex’s death two years before had made him question his values and belief system. Nothing seemed solid in his world anymore. The government was clearly lying to people about the war in Vietnam, with five hundred thousand troops on the ground. Robert wasn’t old, he was turning sixty-three, but he told her he had decided to retire at the end of the year. Her grandfather had been strong and vital at his age, but he hadn’t lost a son either, and Robert was a very different man. Losing Alex had taken everything out of him. He had aged a dozen years in two, and her mother suddenly seemed much older as well. Meredith was very sorry to hear about his plans.
“You’re too young to retire, Dad,” she insisted, trying to convince him. “You make a difference on the bench. What’ll you do if you retire?”
“Play golf,” he said, smiling at her. “Travel with your mother. Relax. See friends.” He was describing an old man’s life, and she felt he wasn’t there yet, or didn’t want him to be. But by the end of lunch, she could see that he was determined, and it saddened her, thinking about it on her way back to the office. She could tell that whatever he said, he had given up on life, and had no fight left in him. Meredith was thinking about it as she walked back to her office and smiled when she saw Charlie and Angela laughing and talking.
Angela was glowing and held out her left hand. She had gotten engaged the night before to her important law firm boyfriend. And the ring was a good size. She was thrilled.
“You’re not giving up practicing law to be a lady of leisure, are you?” Meredith teased her, and Angela said of course not. The wedding was in August and she said she had lots to plan. They were going to spend their honeymoon in Paris. She mentioned that her future parents-in-law weren’t a hundred percent sold on their son’s marriage to a woman of color, but her fiancé was standing firm, and Angela thought they’d come around. Meredith hoped that was true. It made her think of Claudia with Seth after graduation, when he just didn’t have the courage to stand up to his family and marry a Jewish girl. But Angela was thirty-six, and her fiancé, Brady Collins, was thirty-nine. They were adults and knew what they wanted and weren’t dependent on anyone, unlike Claudia and Seth at the time, fresh out of college.
For the next several weeks, Meredith was worried about her father’s retirement. She had asked if he’d be working at the family law firm after he left the bench, but he said he didn’t want to, and they’d been managing fine without him, so he was just going to take life easy and stay home. Meredith was sad that her mother had agreed to the plan. It didn’t sound like a good idea to Merrie, and she was concerned that her father would sink into a depression at home. It didn’t seem healthy to her. He had years of life left in him, but losing Alex had changed all that. Some vital part of him had died with his son.
She was trying not to think about it when Charlie put a thick envelope forwarded by the German embassy in Washington on her desk. She sat staring at it, afraid to open it. Claudia’s answer was inside. It had taken almost two years to get it, an inordinate amount of time. And whatever the Claims Conference offered or didn’t, they planned to appeal the decision, because Meredith was sure that it would be inadequate. She took a deep breath and opened the envelope carefully.
Their response was in German, as all of her correspondence with them had been. And there was a long paragraph of greetings, apologies for the time it had taken, and formal salutations in archaic German. She raced ahead to the next paragraph where they said that much of what Meredith had listed was impossible to evaluate and was listed through the eyes of a child at the time. And making restitution for artwork, jewels, and possessions in the lifestyle of her family was beyond the conference’s means. But they agreed there was no dispute about the three family homes in Berlin, the countryside, and Bavaria, which were known to have belonged to her family and been seized by the Nazis. Since there was no one to claim them at the end of the war, and Claudia’s parents’ deaths in Auschwitz had been confirmed, when she left the country at the age of ten, they had all been sold for the benefit of the government, in most cases well below their actual value, even at the time. Germany had been up for grabs after the war, with properties sold for very little money, abandoned by families who had fled or been killed, Jews who had been deported and never returned.
They also said that it was impossible to put a value on the relatives Mrs. Liebowitz had lost, the childhood that had been stolen from her, and her terrible suffering in the camp. There was no way to measure it or put a financial value on it. But they were fully cognizant of and deeply regretted the pain and losses she had suffered. In light of that, however, in acknowledgment of the homes that had been take
n from them, her becoming an orphan, and the three years she had spent at Auschwitz, they were prepared to offer her the following amount. Meredith read it in deutsche marks then made a rapid conversion, and realized she had calculated it wrong. She did it again, and saw that there was an additional zero on the figure from what she’d originally seen and did the math again.
“Holy shit!” she shouted through her open office doorway, and Charlie came running from his desk, followed by Peggy more slowly.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her immediately, and she grinned at him.
“Not wrong, Charlie. Very, very right.” They had offered her the equivalent of three million dollars, which was a fraction of what her family had lost, but it was a very healthy amount, probably one of the largest they’d given, and one day would make a significant difference to Claudia’s children when they grew up and went to college. “Oh my God.” She did a little jig and danced around the room. She couldn’t wait to tell Claudia. She had been so right to apply for restitution. It had been a long wait, but was well worth it. She called her a few minutes later. She wanted to tell her in person. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Nothing. Thaddeus left for L.A. this morning. He’s wrapping up a film. He’ll be back Sunday night. Why?”
“I’m bored in the city, and I thought I’d come out and have dinner with you.”
“Just like that?” Claudia sounded touched and surprised. Meredith normally only visited on weekends. She worked hard during the week and stayed late in her office.
“Sure. Why not? My love life is at a dead standstill, it’s ancient history, and I haven’t been to a protest in two months,” she said lightly, and Claudia laughed.
“We have to find you a boyfriend.”
“I saw Gunther in Washington two months ago. We had dinner.”
“That’ll never get you anywhere. He lives with his passport and an airline ticket in his teeth.”
The Good Fight Page 22