The Lost Choice Page 4

  Stern was puzzled.“Pardon me?”

  “I don’t want to risk my life. I am not a good man. I have no special affinity for the Jews, Itzhak. I don’t even know why I am doing this. I only know that I must. If not me, then who? If not now, when?

  “Itzhak, I am a lapsed Catholic. I am not a religious man. Surely you know that, but I do remember my mother quoting a scholar. The words were something like, ‘If God had wanted you otherwise, He would have created you otherwise.’ But I feel as though I was created one way, and now, somehow, I am not that same person.” Schindler paused. He stared at the burning end of his cigarette as he continued.

  “I try to tell myself that what I am doing is perfectly logical. After all, if you see a dog about to be crushed under a car, wouldn’t you help? And yet, I know that this course is fraught with peril and certainly has no support among my peers.” Schindler glanced up at Itzhak and smirked at his little joke. “But at some point, a man must stand and act. Not hesitate. Not consider the danger.

  “I bought an enamelware factory in order to get rich on the backs of a cheap Jew labor force. And I did it! I had four million marks in suitcases when we left Krakow. But something happened to me. In any case, I decided to act. So I have two million now.”

  Schindler sighed as he lit a new cigarette from the glowing end of the other. Then he added offhandedly, “And even that might not be enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “Enough to get everyone out of here. The eastern retreat is on in full. Soon, I am sure,we will receive orders to shut down. Everyone will be sent to Auschwitz.”

  LATER THAT WEEK, SCHINDLER DID RECEIVE WORD that Plaszow and all its subcamps were to be voided. The direktor and his accountant knew exactly what this meant. Emptying the camp into another meant a reduction in overall numbers. It meant death.

  Standing in the office entryway late one night, Schindler said to Itzhak,“They are playing their final card. It is time for me to play mine. We will create a force of munitions specialists—on paper of course—workers who can build rockets and bombs. Then I will bribe, plead, lie, reason, and somehow, get authorization for a location. Perhaps into Czechoslovakia . . .”

  “Herr Schindler”—Stern shook his head—“this is impossible!”

  “Never let me hear you say that word again,” Schindler snapped.“When a man puts a limit on possibility, he shrinks his future into a manageable morsel of nothing. At this point, Itzhak, your very life depends upon the accomplishment of what you are considering impossible. You are giving aid and comfort to the enemy in your head. Stop it.”

  The following morning, Stern had three women and six men standing in Schindler’s office. “What is this?” the direktor asked.

  “Will money help our cause?” Stern answered with a question of his own.

  “Without a doubt,” Schindler answered. Smiling gently, not wanting to offend, he asked,“And you have money?”

  “Of a sort,” Stern replied. Motioning to the youngest of the women, he said,“Show him, Elayna.”

  A painfully thin blond girl, no more than seventeen, leaned her head to the side and, to Schindler’s astonishment, removed her glass eye. Hidden in the socket were five diamonds, a ruby, and two emeralds. She offered them to Schindler. “They were my mother’s,” she said simply. “She was sent to Treblinka.”

  Schindler thanked her and turned to the others who were also placing jewels on his desk. Confused, he asked,“Where have you kept them?”The women looked down at the floor. The men seemed ashamed or angry.“I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Is there a hiding place that you’ve found? Perhaps—”

  “They eat them, Herr Direktor,” Stern stated plainly. “They have eaten them over and over again.”

  Embarrassed, but proud, the nine Jewish workers accepted Schindler’s words of gratefulness and began to leave the office. Before they could go, however, Elayna moved slowly toward the direktor’s desk. She was peering around Schindler and he instinctively slid out of her way. “May I?” she asked, cautiously indicating the metal item.

  “Certainly,” he answered, a hint of bewilderment on his face. Everyone in the room had stopped.

  The girl knelt beside the desk and gently picked up the object. She seemed to contemplate the item for a long moment. Then her countenance changed and she lifted her head, directing a strange, questioning expression to Schindler. “It’s a paperweight,” he said, somewhat defensively, and looked at Stern, confused. “It’s just a paperweight.”

  Elayna smiled gently and replaced the object on the desk. “Bless you,” she said.“Thank you and bless you.”

  OSKAR SCHINDLER SPENT EVERY LAST MARK. HE traded his wife’s jewelry, his personal effects—literally everything he had left of value to ensure the final authorization he received in October of 1944. He had secured papers allowing him to move 700 men and 300 women to a factory in Brnenec, Czechoslovakia.

  The direktor used smiles and threats, chutzpah and promises along the way and added several additional groups, bringing the total of Schindlerjuden to 1,098. The other 25,000 men, women, and children from Plaszow were sent to Auschwitz to experience the fate of the several million who had gone before them.

  The factory in Brnenec, just as Herr Schindler had envisioned, produced bombs and rocket loads for the Wehrmacht until they were liberated by the end of the war seven months later. However, during that time, not one single munition passed the quality tests established by the German military. There was a moment, however, during the chaos of departure from Plaszow that Itzhak Stern remembered for the rest of his life. At the rail yard, Itzhak was packed into a cattle container with the others who had been saved. This train, thankfully, was headed away from Auschwitz and toward the factory in Czechoslovakia. He was so tightly squeezed into the dirty, damp car that he could barely move and hardly breathe, when suddenly, he heard his friend calling frantically. “Itzhak! Itzhak Stern!”

  “Here, Herr Schindler! I am here!” Itzhak managed to move his face into a small hole in order to be seen.

  The direktor smiled with clenched teeth. He was in a panic.“Itzhak,” he said forcefully.“I left the paperweight in my office. I think I want to go back.” He glanced around quickly. “I think I want to.” He fumbled for a cigarette. “But I can’t go back. If I leave everyone now . . .”

  As Schindler urgently babbled, Stern maneuvered his body in the crowded rail car. For a moment, his face disappeared.

  “Itzhak!” Schindler beat his fist on the car. “Are you there?”

  Slowly a hand came out of the hole. It was the hand of Itzhak Stern and in it was the paperweight. As the train began to move, Schindler took it and trotted alongside the train as his friend’s smiling face reappeared.

  “I went through the office a last time,” Itzhak yelled over the noise of the train. “I got it for you!”

  “Thank you!” Schindler said as he ran faster to keep up. “Why do you need it?” Itzhak managed to yell as the train gathered momentum and pulled away.

  Oskar stopped. Before he moved to the automobile that was to be his transportation, he looked at the object in his hand and lifted his eyebrows. Placing it in the left jacket pocket of his gray, double-breasted suit, he shook his head and said, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  THREE

  DENVER, COLORADO—JUNE

  THE DENVER MUSEUM OF NATURE AND SCIENCE is one of the finest examples of functional academia in the world. Its massive, four-story presence at 2001 Colorado Boulevard is a monument to the centuries of knowledge gathered and filed in the categories of anthropology, zoology, and earth sciences. The museum is also a repository for important historical documents and photographs. These particular items are guarded by an extremely well organized staff known to the outside world as the Library and Archives group.

  Dylan Langford was keenly aware of the power wielded by these people. He had once even baked cookies for them. “Don’t wait until you need Library and Archives to be nice to them,
” he had been told early in his career.“It’ll be too late.” He knew from experience that if there was even a tiny harbored grudge, they could turn into the dumbest people on the planet, unable to find anything or answer any question.

  Kendra Harper’s youngest brother, Dylan, had only been at the museum for several months. He was twenty-nine years old and on the fast track with his career. Well over six feet tall and rail thin, his prematurely graying hair and receding hairline gave the appearance of an older man. Dylan cultivated that perception, knowing that the world of anthropology and archaeology was rife with competition in its ranks, and young people in his field were often overlooked for advancement.

  Dylan was now a full-fledged curator of anthropology. Though not the department head, he was free to pursue his own course of study. He was certainly qualified. After receiving his BA from the University of Nebraska, he had earned an MA and finally, his PhD in anthropology from Johns Hopkins.

  His office was not big, but it was nicer than most of the interior “cubbyholes” on the third floor. It was a “cubbyhole” with a nameplate on the door, which, at the moment, was open. The office boasted a wall-sized world map and a huge desk circa 1970-something-or-other. Behind the desk a computer station jutted out from a wall of bookshelves that were filled with research manuals and college textbooks that he hadn’t been able to sell and was too cheap to throw away. His rolling chair was the only one in his office—not counting the folding chair stored behind the door—and often, he gleefully spun like a kid from his desk to the computer station.

  Dylan glanced at his watch and pushed back from his computer as he turned an entire circle in the short distance back to his desk. Almost two o’clock, he thought. He drummed his hands on his desktop. Dylan hated it when people were late. Not that Dorry was . . . yet.

  His sister had called and cleared the way for her next-door neighbor, Dorry Chandler, to make contact. “She’s nice and fun and all that, Dylan,” Kendra had said, “and I love her dearly. But just so you know, she is a reporter, and she has one of those kind of . . . um . . . you know, rabid personalities.” He wasn’t exactly sure what his sister had meant by “rabid” personality, but felt that he might have one too.

  “Hello?” Dorry stuck her head in and smiled.“Dylan?” She wore jeans and a pink Polo shirt that made her red hair look as if it were on fire.

  “Dorry. Hi,” he said as he rose from his chair and moved around the desk, sneaking a look at his watch.“You’re on time.”

  “You said 2:00. It’s 2:00. I am on time! Believe me, if it had been 2:01, I’d have called.”

  Dylan laughed.“Last of a breed.”

  “No,” Dorry smirked,“evidently, there’s still you.”

  Dylan laughed again. He liked her.“Yep, there’s still me. Hey, I enjoyed meeting you and your husband the other night. Mark, right?”

  “Yeah, good memory. You know, Mark has the ‘on time thing’ too. He’s a detective with DPD so that goes with the territory.” Dylan nodded. “I really appreciate you taking the time to see me, Dylan. It’s more of a curiosity deal than anything, I suppose, but you’re the only person I know who works in a museum, so . . .”

  Dylan was used to that particular line of thought. You work in a museum! You must know everything. It was funny to him. People treated the janitor the same way. After all, he worked in a museum too. Excuse me, sir, I know you’re waxing the floors right now, but during what paleontological period did DNA manifest itself to bring about a broadening of the species? It was incredible. Dylan wondered if they treated other professions the same way.

  “Well,” he said, “let’s see what you have.”

  As Dorry dug through her purse, Dylan retrieved the chair from behind the door and unfolded it.“Have a seat. Sorry, it’s kind of cramped in here.”

  “Bigger than my office,” Dorry remarked as she produced the object from her purse.

  Dylan took the object, glanced up at Dorry briefly, and moved around behind his desk. Seemingly transfixed by what he was seeing, he slowly lowered himself into his chair and turned on a small lamp attached to some sort of magnification device. Frowning, he said,“You got this where?” “My son found it. Basically in our backyard.”

  Dylan looked up, a bemused expression on his face.“Oh, come on. Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said casually. “I suppose it’s not just every day one comes across a Mesopotamian relic beside someone’s patio in Denver.”

  “What?!”

  Dylan chuckled. “I don’t mean to be melodramatic. Frankly, the piece is not totally unusual . . . I don’t think. I just happen to recognize it because there are fifty jillion pieces just like it in museums all over the world . . . The question mark is with your kid finding it where he did.” Dylan paused.“And there’s this script, too, of course . . .”

  “So that is some kind of writing?”

  “Uh-huh.” Dylan ran his fingernail into the grooves. “I don’t recognize it, but I’ll pass this on and find out what’s what. We should know more in a week or two.”

  “Two?” Dorry’s eyes were wide-open. “I just thought we might be able . . . I mean that you could . . . two weeks?”

  Dylan smiled, stood up, and came around to Dorry’s side of the desk. “Look”—he shrugged—“this kind of thing is not in my area of expertise. I’ve got some buddies though. We’ll figure it out.”

  Dorry stood and nodded. “Okay, thanks. That makes sense. I’m just sort of a ‘right now’ person, you know. And I thought, hey, he works in a museum . . .”

  Dylan smiled.

  After Dorry left, Dylan shut the door and went back to his desk. Sitting down, he began slowly swinging the chair back and forth with his foot. Dylan stared blankly at the map on the wall, not really taking it in, but lost in thought—only occasionally glancing at the object still in his hands. So a kid finds this in his backyard, Dylan thought. Kinda weird, kinda not.

  No one could ever know with certainty how any particular relic came to lie in a particular place—it was one of the enduring mysteries of his profession and purely guesswork. Origins,however,were easier to pinpoint. For instance, no one knew how the obsidian pottery with elaborate faces formed into the edges ended up in one hundred feet of water off the Pacific coast. Archaeologists were, however, able to determine that they were more than three thousand years old and came from Southeast Asia.

  Moving the chair closer to his desk, Dylan shook his head sharply to clear the cobwebs and placed the object in his hand under the magnifying light. Mentally, he plodded through what he knew. Almost certainly leaded bronze. A cast piece, no carving except the script. Script is clearly etched. No staining or corrosion evident. Is that unusual? I don’t know.

  For a full minute or more Dylan sat completely still, then he opened the drawer by his right knee. Carefully, he removed a small electronic scale and placed it next to the light on his desk. Plugging it into an adapter on the base of the lamp, he turned the scale on and placed the object onto its measuring pan. Dylan pressed the buttons “Clear” and “Zero,” then watched as the digital numbers 139.22 appeared in green. Hmmm.Okay. A little more than 139 grams . . . almost five ounces. He pulled a small tape measure from the drawer in front of him—43.4 inches long and . . . 17.8 inches at its widest point.

  Dylan leaned back in his chair, faced the map, and began moving back and forth again. He reviewed what he knew, which was not much. I am an anthropologist, not an archaeologist. Dylan smiled. Most people, he knew, did not know the difference. He had to explain it to his own mother every time he was home for a holiday. Archaeologists studied ancient civilizations, whereas he, an anthropologist, was concerned with the human beings themselves—their environment, social interaction, and culture.

  Dylan’s particular area of proficiency was directed toward the Plains Indians of the early 1800s. Show me an arrowhead, I’ll tell you what they ate for dinner. He turned to look at the object on the scale. B
ut I don’t know jack about this! Suddenly he stood up, grabbed the object, and slipping it into his pants pocket, headed to the door. I may not know anything, he smiled to himself, but I know some archys who do!

  TWO WEEKS LATER, DORRY SAT IN TRAFFIC AS SHE left downtown Denver. She kept a wary eye on the sports car trying to ease in front of her as she fished the chirping cell phone from her purse. Seeing “HOME” on the display, she punched “Send” and answered. “Is this my big boy or my little boy?”

  On the other end of the line, Mark chuckled. “This is your big boy. Why do you ask?”

  “Because if it was my little boy,” Dorry said wryly, “I didn’t want him to hear his mother screaming like a lunatic.” “Traffic?”

  “Yep. I just might kill somebody in a couple of minutes.” “Don’t tell me that. I’m a cop.”

  Dorry laughed. “If I had known cops worked shifts and got off at three in the afternoon, I’d never have gone to journalism school. I’d have been running the obstacle course at the academy with you.”

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t think so much of the job when I was eleven-to-seven,” Mark replied. Changing the subject, he said, “Hey, what I called about . . . Dylan touched base earlier—Kendra’s brother? The guy from the museum?”

  “Really?” Dorry said, her mood changing instantly despite the traffic.“What did he say?”

  “Nothing really,” Mark said.“He told me he was headed out our way tonight—I guess to see his sister—anyway, he said he had some info on the object and asked if it was okay to drop by. I told him just to plan on eating dinner with us.”There was silence on the phone.“Dorry?”

  “Yes?” Her mood had changed again.“Mark, I won’t be home till after seven o’clock! I have an article to write tonight . . . Dinner? What time is he coming?”

  “Well, I told him . . . seven . . . -ish. Tell you what: Michael and I will cook. You won’t have to do a thing.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dorry said through clenched teeth. “696-8777.”

  “What?” Mark asked.