Robert Sawyer - Quantum Night

I looked up. The paper fluttered in my hands.

“Thank you, sir. Now, who is Patricia Marchuk?”

“My mother.”

“And, just to be clear, she’s your biological mother—and Ernst Kulyk was her biological father, correct? Neither you nor your mother were adopted?”

“That’s right.”

“Is your maternal grandfather still alive?”

“No. He died sometime in the 1970s.”

“And you were born in 1982, correct? So you never met him, right?”

“Never.”

“And your mother, is she still alive?”

“No. She passed fifteen years ago.”

“In 2005?”

“Yes.”

“Were you estranged from her?”

“No.”

“And yet it’s your testimony before this court that you didn’t know what her father—your grandfather—did during World War II?”

My heart was pounding. “I—honestly, I had no idea.”

“Where did you live in March 2001, when this article was published?”

“In Winnipeg. I was in second-year university then.”

“A sophomore?”

“We don’t use that term in Canada, but yes.”

“And the Winnipeg Free Press, correct me if I’m wrong, is now and was then the largest-circulation daily newspaper in that city, right?”

“I believe so, yes.”

“So surely someone must have mentioned this article to you, no?”

“Never.”

“Seriously? Didn’t your mother say anything to you about this revelation?”

Acid was splashing at the back of my throat. “Not that I recall.”

“Not that you recall,” she repeated. “There’s a second highlighted passage on that page. Would you read it, please?”

I looked down and did so. “‘Ernst Kulyk was a local, living near Sobibor. Historian Howard Green at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles says Marchuk fits the physical description of Ernst the Enforcer, a guard notorious for his brutality.’”

“And your work, Professor, as we’ve heard here in this courtroom, is designed to exonerate those accused of heinous crimes, is it not?”

“Not at all. I—”

“Please, sir. Surely the defense would not have engaged your services if they hadn’t thought your testimony could be used to convince the honest men and women of this jury that some people just happen to be psychopaths, that God made them that way, that they can’t help themselves, that they shouldn’t be held accountable to the highest standard of the law, isn’t that so?”

“Objection!” said Juan. “Argumentative.”

“Sustained. Careful, Miss Dickerson.”

“Mr. Marchuk, sir, how would you characterize the relationship between your family history and your area of research? Isn’t it true that the one inspired the other?”

“I told you I didn’t know about my grandfather.”

“Come now, sir. I can understand wanting to put your family’s shame— Canada’s shame—behind you, but, really, isn’t it true that you, in fact, had made up your mind in this case before you ever met Devin Becker? For to find Devin Becker accountable, to insist he answer for his crimes, his perversions, his cruelty, would require you to demand the same of your grandfather. Isn’t that so?”

“Even if I’d known about my grandfather,” I said, feeling dizzy now, “the cases are vastly different, separated by decades and thousands of miles.”

“Trivialities,” said Dickerson. “Isn’t it true that you’ve been called ‘an apologist for atrocities’ in print?”

“Never in a peer-reviewed journal.”

“True,” said Dickerson. “I allude to Canada’s National Post. But the fact of the matter remains: is it not true that every aspect of your testimony here today is colored by your desire to see your grandfather as a blameless victim of circumstances?”

“My research is widely cited,” I said, feeling as though the wooden floor of the witness dock was splintering beneath me, “and it, in turn, cites such classics as the work of Cleckley and Milgram.”

“But, unlike them, you come at this with an agenda, do you not?”

It seemed utterly pointless to protest that Stanley Milgram’s family had been Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust—his work was all about trying to make sense of the senseless, to fathom the inexplicable, to comprehend how sane, normal people could have done those things to other thinking, feeling beings.

“That would not be my position,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady.

“No,” responded Belinda Dickerson, looking once more at the men and women in the jury dock, all of whom were sitting up in rapt attention. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be.”

Judge Kawasaki finally called the recess, and I exited the Atlanta courtroom, my heart pounding again, which, given my history, is a feeling I hated. Juan Sanchez was going to have lunch with Devin Becker, but I doubted they wanted me to join them. I headed out into the afternoon heat, air shimmering above the parking lot’s asphalt, used a shaking hand to put my Bluetooth receiver in my ear, and called my sister in Calgary. The phone rang, then a woman said, “Morrell, Thompson, Chandler, and Marchuk.”

“Heather Marchuk, please.” My sister’s marriage had fallen apart long ago—way before mine had—but she’d always used her maiden name professionally.

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“It’s her brother Jim.”

“Oh, Mr. Marchuk, hi. Are you in town?”

I’m usually pretty good with names, and I suspect if I wasn’t so distraught, I would have come up with the receptionist’s. I could picture her, though—blond, petite, round glasses.

“No. Is Heather in?”

“Let me put you through.”

I saw a husky man looking at me—probably a reporter hoping for a quote. I turned and walked briskly away.

My sister and I talked a couple of times a month—the maximum Gustav would allow—but it was always in the evenings; she was clearly surprised to be getting a call from me during the workday. “Jim, is everything okay? Where are you?”

I couldn’t answer the first question in a reassuring way, so I skipped to the second. “Atlanta.”

Heather knew me too well. “Something is wrong. What?”

“Do you know what Grandpa Kulyk did in World War II?”

Silence for a moment. Off in the distance—here or there, I wasn’t sure which—a siren was wailing. “What the hell, Jim.”

“Sorry?” A question, not an apology.

“What the hell,” she said again.

“Excuse me?”

“Jim, if this is some kind of joke…”

“I’m not joking.”

“You know full well what he did in the war, at that camp.”

“Well, I know now,” I said. “I found out today. I’m here giving expert testimony in that trial I told you about. The D.A. blindsided me with the news.”

“It’s not news, for Christ’s sake,” said Heather. “It came out ages ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Are you nuts? We all knew about it.”

My head was swimming. “I don’t remember that.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Jim, look, I’ve got a client meeting in—well, damn, I should be doing it now. I don’t know what to say, but get some help, okay?”

I’d have been happy to go home after the morning’s evisceration, but when the judge had called the recess, Miss Dickerson indicated she wasn’t through with me. After failing to find a vegan entrée in the courthouse cafeteria, I’d settled for a packaged salad and a cup of black coffee.

The fireworks began again as soon as court resumed. “Objection!” said Juan, rising in response to Dickerson asking me once more about my personal history. “This fishing expedition has no bearing on the sentencing of Devin Becker.”