The Imperfects

by Amy Meyerson

  “You’re serious?” Of course he’s serious. “It isn’t that easy for most people. The principal never would have believed me.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “You have no right to judge me,” Beck says, careful to keep her voice low. The conference room sits at the center of their office, protected only by plates of glass. Anyone who walks by can hear them.

  “That’s the thing. I don’t judge you. I really don’t care what you did. I believe in rehabilitation. If we atone for our mistakes, we can overcome them. That’s the thing, though. You still feel aggrieved, like nothing that’s happened to you is your fault.”

  Beck feels the first hot tear, followed by another as he continues to outline his argument, an exhaustive review of her blame on Jake, on her mother, on Molly Stanton from law school, whose name Beck is surprised he remembers, on her high school principal, and on Lizzie Meyers, who had actually thanked Mr. O’Neal for a grade she’d deserved.

  “Please stop.” While Tom might be right that she distributes blame on everyone but herself, he’s wrong about Mr. O’Neal and what happened in high school. The principal never would have believed her over a popular teacher, especially not after she broke into the school computer system. The fact that Tom can’t see this proves just how wrong he is to represent her family. “I’m going to ask the partners to put someone else on the case.”

  Beck stands to leave, then hesitates. If she asks for different representation, she’ll have to explain why she doesn’t want to work with Tom. The partners don’t know that she and Tom dated. Karen kept this secret, even though she should have told them. Beck doesn’t want to get Karen in trouble.

  Tom walks around the table and stands too close to her. “Let me help you with this.”

  “Why is it so important to you?”

  “Because you deserve someone who will go above and beyond. Helen deserves it. No one else is going to do that.”

  Beck looks away. When she returns her gaze to his, he’s staring insistently at her. “You don’t see why this might be a bad idea?”

  “Of course I do, but we’re going into this with our eyes open. If it gets to be too much, if for any reason you feel uncomfortable, one word, and we’ll put someone else on the case.” His eyes implore her, and she wishes she’d asked Karen to stay. It wouldn’t be fair, though, putting Karen in the middle of this any more than she already is.

  Beck remains unconvinced, but she tells Tom, “Okay. We’ll give it a try.” She doesn’t say yes for him but for Karen, for the Millers. Tom is a good lawyer. Judging from the broad smile on his face, she can tell that he will put up one hell of a fight for her family, even if he didn’t fight for her.

  Together, they walk down that hall, Beck taking notes as Tom rattles off everything they need to do. First thing, they need to file a motion to suppress the seizure, arguing that there’s no proof it’s the Florentine. “The IGS report never mentions the Florentine by name. Who’s to say it isn’t another diamond? Maybe not the Star of Michigan, but there’s no definitive proof it’s the Florentine.”

  “The IGS report mentioned a heart-shaped feathering in the diamond. I looked it up, and various documentation of the Florentine noted the same unique inclusion. Charles of Lorraine even mentioned it when he gave the diamond to Marie Antoinette on her wedding day,” Beck counters. With the heart in this diamond, Charles wrote to his daughter, so, too, is my heart with you. “Plus it’s the exact weight and dimensions as the Florentine.”

  “Obviously, we won’t win. It’s a good place to start, raising doubt about the provenance of the diamond. From there, we’ll file motions to delay discovery.” He lists off several objections they can raise. “The other parties will want to delay, too.”

  The longer the delay, the more time they have to prove the diamond is theirs.

  Beck continues to walk quietly beside him, jotting down the experts they’ll need to find in European law and history, a gemologist—Viktor, but someone else, too, given that he was the first one to identify the diamond and they’ll need to call him as a witness—a jewelry historian, past civil forfeiture cases before the Circuit and Supreme Courts that may offer elucidating precedent.

  “And keep searching any leads you have on Helen. We don’t just need to prove the diamond doesn’t belong to one of the other parties. We have to prove it belonged to your grandmother, and now to you.”

  They stop at her cubicle. “And we need to silence your father. We can file a restraining order if he comes near you or your family again, but it’s better if we get rid of him civilly. Try digging up some dirt on him. A guy like that, it shouldn’t be too hard.”

  Beck watches Tom skip down the hall, his gait lighter than she’s seen in months. While she still feels wary about working with him, she knows he’ll do a good job representing her family. She tells herself that’s the most important thing.

  * * *

  “You really think that’s a good idea? Tom?” Ashley asks her sister through her iPad screen. Her house is so quiet she can hear the floorboards creaking beneath her feet. Now that Ryan isn’t working, it’s a rare afternoon that she has the house to herself. Maybe she’ll walk around naked. But the press still occasionally stops by, and the last thing she needs is a blurred picture of her nude self on the cover of the New York Post. She can only imagine the title, “A Fraud Exposed!”

  “I don’t trust it. An ex who wants to help you.” Deborah shakes her head, tsking.

  “I know, Mom. You’ve made that perfectly clear.” Beck rolls her eyes at Deborah, who is sitting beside her on the couch at Edgehill Road. She’s invited herself over for dinner to talk to Deborah about Kenny. If anyone knows his skeletons, it’s her mother.

  Beck returns her attention to her siblings on the iPad. “He’s a good lawyer and he feels guilty. He’ll put more of himself into it than some random lawyer.”

  “Let’s just hope he doesn’t put too much of himself into it,” Ashley snipes.

  Deborah laughs until she notices the stricken look on Beck’s face.

  “I told you that’s over.”

  “So what do we do now?” Jake asks.

  “We keep looking for Helen.” Beck pulls out a legal pad.

  “Uh-oh, Beck made a list,” Ashley teases.

  Ignoring her sister, Beck outlines the leads they still need to investigate. While the diamonds they found in Helen’s doll may have sold for fifteen thousand dollars, they did not produce concrete evidence that Helen brought the hatpin over from Vienna. That’s still their operating theory, but they need proof to convince the court.

  “But why do we think Helen brought the hatpin with her, just because we found diamonds in a doll from Austria?” Ashley asks.

  “The diamonds are from the same era,” Beck says. Her sister casts her a look: So? “Do you have another explanation how Helen could have gotten turn-of-the-century diamonds? Now isn’t the time to cast doubt.”

  “Why not? Isn’t that what the other parties will do?” Jake asks.

  “That’s even more reason to commit to our story. We need to develop a theory, then find evidence that supports it. That’s how the law works. There’s never 100 percent truth, only competing theories. We need to make sure ours is more convincing than the others.”

  “And what is our theory, that Helen had the hatpin in Vienna, hid it in her doll, and brought it to the US where fifteen years later she set it in a brooch?” Obviously, Jake knows this is the theory. He’s fleshed it out in scene. But it’s a story made for fiction, the big screen. Compelling, far-fetched, lacking solid ground.

  “If we can find the maker’s mark, then yes.”

  “I still don’t understand why that’s helpful,” Deborah interrupts her daughter.

  “It tells us who made the brooch.” The clueless expression on Deborah’s face persists. Beck flips to a fresh page on her yellow
legal pad and writes, Habsburgs lose diamond 1918 → Helen gets diamond → Diamond set in brooch 1954 or earlier.

  “We either need to figure out how the diamond got from the Habsburgs to Helen or the opposite, from the brooch back to Helen.”

  “And how do we know Helen didn’t get the diamond after it was in the brooch? The first photo we have is from 1955,” Deborah says.

  “Viktor thinks it was made around 1954, so if she was wearing it by New Year’s Eve, she’s likely the original owner. And even if she wasn’t, if we can locate the company that made the brooch, their records should tell us who had it made. From there, we can work backward. Let’s just stick to the plan, okay?”

  Beck doesn’t even bother mentioning Peter Winkler, who after four emails still has not written her back. She doesn’t mention Christian, either, dutifully translating Kurt Winkler’s books. They’ve had drinks three times, each ostensibly to discuss the translation. While the flirting continued, it hasn’t progressed, and the more Christian smiles at her, the more he casts those dimples, the more she’s decided that he’s too young for her, too unserious. The flirting is all she needs from him.

  “You mean your plan,” Jake scoffs.

  “Do you have any better ideas?” Beck matches his disdain with her own.

  “It just doesn’t all add up to me.”

  “That’s why we need more evidence.”

  Their voices rise, risking a fight. Ashley’s own fights exhaust her; she has no interest in sitting through her siblings’ futile bickering. So she shares the news she’s avoided delivering throughout their conversation. “I found Flora.”

  It took Ashley days to open the envelope from the Holocaust Museum, and once she did, she wished she’d tossed it into the fireplace unopened. “She was arrested on April 25, 1939,” Ashley tentatively begins.

  “That was just a few days after Helen left for America,” Beck realizes.

  “Do you think it was a coincidence that she was arrested so soon after?” Jake asks.

  “It’s impossible to know,” Ashley says.

  “If Helen hadn’t left... If she’d still been with Flora...” Deborah stops short of finishing her sentence. These last few weeks, she’s been so angry with Helen for lying to her about her father. This doesn’t undo that anger, but it burnishes its edges. If Helen hadn’t left, if she’d stayed with her mother like she’d wanted to—Deborah can’t bear to finish the thought.

  “Where was she sent?” Beck asks.

  “To Lichtenburg. It was one of the first concentration camps. There was this castle the Nazis used. It was only open for another month or so after Flora got there.” Ashley keeps her tone dispassionate. It is the only way to get through the details.

  “Then where’d she go?” Jake asks.

  “Ravensbrück. I couldn’t locate her exact files, but she wasn’t one of the survivors.” Ashley had never heard of Ravensbrück. It was an all-women’s camp, a training site for female guards who showed their worth to the SS in their ruthlessness. The majority of the inmates were not Jewish but political prisoners, academics, Romani, deviants. Flora probably wasn’t one of the “rabbits,” who were predominantly Polish, their bodies sliced open, amputated, subjected to gangrene and transplants. It was also statistically unlikely that Flora was one of the few women forced into prostitution or that she was sterilized, a fate inflicted mostly on the Romani. “I don’t recommend googling it.”

  Even if she wasn’t one of these populations, if she’d been shot or gassed or fatally malnourished, Flora suffered a horrible death.

  “Well,” Deborah says, “now we know.”

  “It’s weird. I figured she probably died in a concentration camp, but knowing for certain...” Ashley can’t explain why she feels so much worse having her assumptions confirmed, but judging from the expressions on her family’s faces, they seem to understand.

  “And that Flora was taken away days after she sent Helen to the US,” Jake adds. In a script, it’s the heartbreaking twist at the end, and Jake curses himself for thinking about narrative at a time like this.

  “How does it help us?” Ashley means, How does it help us heal? but Beck misinterprets.

  “Flora was never going to lead us to the Florentine,” Beck adds. “That wasn’t the point.”

  * * *

  After they hang up, Beck and Deborah sit side by side on Helen’s couch, staring into the dark expanse of Helen’s dormant television. The air-conditioning that Deborah has put in the window does its best to keep up with July’s heat, but the living room remains suffocating. There’s something comforting about it, though. Helen never had a window unit. She rarely brought out the fan. The heat makes Beck feel closer to Helen.

  “It doesn’t change anything,” Beck says, wiping a film of sweat from her upper lip.

  “Yet, somehow, it changes everything,” Deborah counters, wiping her own sweat from her forehead. If they win this case, the first thing she’ll do is install central air.

  “I need to talk to you about something.” Beck feels Deborah stiffen. “It’s about Kenny.”

  “I haven’t been in touch with him,” Deborah protests. “He’s called a few times. I promise, the second he speaks, I hang up on him.”

  “He called you?” Beck feels the heat rise in her. “I told him I’d castrate him if he came near you.”

  Deborah laughs. “That’s twisted.”

  “It was what Helen said to him, if he ever told anyone about the diamonds.”

  “Now that I believe.”

  Deborah’s lightness surprises Beck. “You aren’t upset about everything he’s been saying?”

  Deborah shrugs. “He’s a novelty. As soon as the press has a chance, they’ll turn on him. It all makes for a good story.”

  “So let’s do it. Let’s slaughter him. You must have some dirt on him.”

  “I do.” Deborah pauses. “Isn’t there another way? I don’t want to go low just because he does.” Deborah smiles at the surprise on her daughter’s face. “It’s that shocking I’d want to take the high road?”

  “A bit,” Beck teases, then promises, “I’ll find another way to get rid of him.”

  After dinner, Deborah doesn’t want Beck to leave, and she feels Beck dawdling, perched at the dining room table after it’s cleared. Deborah sits beside her. “Want some tea?”

  “Sure.”

  In the time it takes Deborah to steep a pot of chamomile flowers and fresh mint, Beck has put on reading glasses and turned the dining room table into her evening office. Printed documents cascade around her.

  “What’s that?” Deborah asks as she places a cup before her daughter.

  “The book Christian translated for me. I know Ashley and Jake probably think it’s a waste of time. I just... I feel like there might be something here. If we can locate when the diamond disappeared, maybe it will help us figure out where it was before Helen had it.”

  “Can I help?” She waits for Beck to intimate that it is too complicated for her.

  Beck removes her glasses and massages her temples. “Sure, I could use a set of fresh eyes.”

  Beck scans the piles and hands chapter twenty-six, “The Empire’s Last Breaths,” to her mother.

  “There could be something in that chapter about when the royal family fled. I’m reading about later, in Switzerland, then Portugal. So far, I haven’t seen anything about any jewels. I know they sold whatever crown jewels they could. They were hard up for cash.” Beck slides her glasses up her nose and returns her attention to the page. “I should warn you, Winkler’s prose is a bit flowery.”

  Winkler’s prose is flamboyant. Everything is a valiant travail, a noble endeavor worthy of myriad generations of intrepid bloodline. Deborah’s eyes start to blur. She rouses herself. She can’t appear bored, but Deborah always was a fickle student.

  The chapter
begins with the relative calm of the royal family’s life in Laxenburg, Austria, as their empire crumbled around them. Mass at 6:00 a.m., followed by a breakfast of meat and mineral water before the emperor left for the army headquarters at Baden, returning for lunch with the empress and their—at the time—five children. Winkler continues to describe the emperor’s schedule, where someone has written in bolded parenthesis: (Snooze fest! Blah blah blah... I’m glossing over this. If you need something to put you to sleep, give a holler and I’ll translate these parts for you!)

  Deborah flips through pages with more bolded parentheses, smiley faces, and jokes (so this Kaiser walks into a bar...). Deborah grins at Beck.

  “What?”

  Deborah holds the paper toward her daughter. “Who’s Mr. Bold-Parenthesis?”

  “Why do you assume it’s a he? No one. Christian. The translator. Just keep reading.”

  And read she does. She reads about Czech independence and the fall of Bulgaria, about the Peoples’ Manifesto, which shifted the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a federation of nation-states until she gets to a long section where Winkler quotes the empress’s firsthand accounts of the autumn before the empire fell. Unlike Winkler, the empress’s words are matter-of-fact. They pull Deborah in.

  One section is particularly riveting. The empress, Zita, describes the days after a revolution broke out in Budapest. While she and the emperor traveled to Vienna, they’d left the children behind in Gödöllö, Hungary, not too far from the frontlines in Budapest. They’d been assured that the children would be safer there. Vienna had seemed more dangerous.

  On the night the revolutionaries stormed the palace in Gödöllö, Zita woke to a phone call from Budapest. She roused her husband, who sat up in a panic. Before he’d wiped the sleep from his eyes, before he knew that a revolt had started in Hungary, he asked, “Is it the children?” Zita chewed at her knuckle, listening to her husband’s side of the conversation as the general filled him in on what was happening in Hungary.