The Things We Cherished Read Free Page B

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 thewar provoked 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 formalitiesof 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