Quantum Night

3

“And so, Professor Marchuk, in summary, is it your testimony that the defendant, Devin Becker, is indeed a psychopath?”

Juan Sanchez had rehearsed my direct examination repeatedly. He wanted to ensure that not only the judge, who had heard psychological testimony in many previous cases, could follow me, but also that the seven men and five women in the jury dock, none of whom had ever taken a psych course, couldn’t help but see the logic of it all.

Juan had told me to make eye contact with the jurors. Sadly, juror four (the heavyset black woman) and juror nine (the white guy with the comb-over) were both looking down. But I did connect briefly with each of the others although three averted their gazes as soon as they felt my eyes land on them.

I turned back to him and nodded decisively. “Yes, exactly. There is no question whatsoever.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Juan looked questioningly at Judge Kawasaki. The best way to use an expert defense witness, he’d told me, was to present direct examination immediately before a recess so the argument would have time to take root before the prosecution attacked it; he’d timed my testimony to finish just before noon. But either Kawasaki was oblivious to the time or he was onto Juan’s strategy since he turned to the D.A. and said the words Juan himself had failed to utter. “Your witness, Miss Dickerson.”

Juan shot me a disappointed glance, then moved over and sat down next to Devin Becker, who, as always, had a scowl on his thin face.

I shifted nervously in my seat. We’d rehearsed this part, too, trying to predict what questions Belinda Dickerson would fire off in an attempt to discredit my microsaccades technique. But as Moltke the Elder famously said, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Dickerson was forty-eight, tall, lithe, with a long, pale face and short black hair; if the pole holding the Georgia flag at the side of the room ever broke, she could stand in as its replacement. “Mr. Marchuk,” she said, in a voice that was stronger than one might have expected from her build, “we heard a great deal about your qualifications when my opponent called you to the stand.”

It didn’t seem to be a question, so I said nothing. Perhaps she expected me to make some modest noise, and, in a social situation, I might have done just that. But here, in this court, with the hot dry air—not to mention an annoying fly buzzing around the light hanging over my head—I simply nodded as she went on: “Degrees, postdocs, clinical certifications, academic appointments.”

Again, not a question. I had been generally nervous about being cross-examined, but I now relaxed slightly. If she wanted to go over my CV with forensic glee, that was fine by me; I’d embellished nothing.

“But now, sir,” Dickerson continued, “I’d like to explore some parts of your background that weren’t brought forth by Mr. Sanchez.”

I looked at Juan, whose head did an avian snap toward the jury, then ricocheted back to facing me. “Yes?” I said to her.

“Where is your family from?”

“I was born in Calgary, Alberta.”

“Yes, yes. But your family, your people: where are they from?”

Like everyone, I’ve been asked this question before, and I usually made a joke of my reply, the kind only an academic could get away with. “My ancestors,” I’d say, “came from Olduvai Gorge.” I glanced at the jury box and also at the dour, wrinkled countenance of Judge Kawasaki. There was no point in uttering a joke you knew was going to bomb. “My heritage, you mean? It’s Ukrainian.”

“So your mother, she was Ukrainian?”

“Yes. Well, Ukrainian-Canadian.”

She made a dismissive gesture, as if I were muddying the waters with pointless cavils. “And your maternal grandfather, was he Ukrainian, too?”

“Yes.”

“Your grandfather emigrated to Canada at some point?”

“The 1950s. I don’t know precisely when.”

“But he lived in Ukraine prior to that?”

“Actually, I think the last place he lived in Europe was Poland.”

Dickerson took a turn looking at the jury. She raised her eyebrows as if astonished by my answer. “Where in Poland?”

It took me a second to come up with the name, and I doubt I did justice to the pronunciation. “Gdenska.”

“Which is where?”

I frowned. “As I said, in Poland.”

“Yes, yes. But where in Poland? What’s it close to?”

“It’s north of Warsaw, I think.”

“I believe that’s correct, yes, but is it close to any… any site, shall we say… of historical significance?”

Juan Sanchez rose, jaw jutting even more than usual. “Objection, Your Honor. This travelogue can be of no relevance to the matter at hand.”

“Overruled,” said Kawasaki. “But you are trying my patience, Miss Dickerson.”

She apparently took that as license to ask a leading question. “Mr. Marchuk, sir, let me put it bluntly: isn’t that village of yours, Gdenska, isn’t it just ten miles from Sobibor?”

Her consistent refusal to use one of the honorifics I was entitled to was, of course, an attempt to undermine me in front of the jury. “I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea.”

“Fine, fine. But it’s near Sobibor, isn’t it? Only a few minutes by car, no?”

“I really don’t know.”

“Or by train?” She let that sink in for a beat, then: “What did your grandfather do during World War II?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you?”

I felt my eyebrows going up. “No.”

“That surprises me, sir. It surprises me a great deal.”

“Why?”

“You actually don’t get to ask questions, sir; that’s not the way this works. Now, is it really your testimony here, under oath, that you don’t know what your mother’s father did during World War II?”

“That’s right,” I said, utterly perplexed. “I don’t know.”

Dickerson turned to the jury and lifted her hands in an “I gave him a chance” sort of way. She then walked to her desk, and her young female assistant passed her a sheet of paper. “Your Honor, I’d like to introduce this notarized scan of an article from the Winnipeg Free Press of March twenty-third, 2001.”

Kawasaki gestured for Dickerson to come forward, and she handed him the piece of paper. He gave it a perfunctory glance, then passed it to the clerk. “So ordered,” he said. “Mark as People’s one-four-six.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” she said, retrieving the sheet. “Now, Mr. Marchuk, would you be so kind as to read us the first indicated passage?”

She handed me the page, which had two separate paragraphs highlighted in blue. I couldn’t make out what they said without my reading glasses, and so I reached into my suit jacket—and saw the guard at the far end of the room move to draw his revolver. I slowly removed my cheaters, perched them on my nose, and began reading aloud: “‘More startling revelations were made this week as papers from the former Soviet Union continued to be made public. The newly disclosed documents have a Canadian connection. Ernst Kulyk…’” I faltered, and my throat went dry as I skimmed ahead.

“Continue, please, sir,” said Dickerson.

I swallowed, then: “‘Ernst Kulyk, the father of Patricia Marchuk, a prominent Calgary attorney, has been revealed to have been a guard at the Nazi Sobibor death camp, implicated in the deaths of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of Polish Jews.’”

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?”