Bearing Witness

by Michael A. Kahn

  “Well,” Warnholtz continued, “when Conrad finished painting him, he stepped back and took out his pistol. Me and Rudy, we moved out of the way.” He paused.

  “Tell me what happened, sir.”

  “Well, he aimed that pistol and started shooting. Fired five bullets as I recall—couple in the arms, one in the thigh, two in the belly. The Jew was still conscious, but just barely. Had his eyes open, kind of silently begging, if you know what I mean. Conrad walked right up to him and shoved that gun in his mouth. Still hadn’t said a word. Not a thing. He leaned in close, cleared his throat, and spit right into that Jew’s face. Then he leaned away and pulled the trigger. Damn. Blew off the back of his goddamn head, brains everywhere.”

  Two of the female jurors were crying. I heard someone blow her nose and looked up to see that it was Judge Wagner herself. She was daubing her eyes with a tissue.

  Through it all, Ruth remained standing. Alone. Her eyes clear now, implacable. She stared at Conrad Beckman’s lowered head.

  A long pause, and then my voice on the tape. “That was my client’s uncle.”

  “Rosenthal?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, like I say, I didn’t pull the trigger.”

  A pause.

  “Mr. Warnholtz, I’d like to call you as a witness in this case.”

  “You sure?”

  “Is what you told me tonight the truth?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Would you be willing to repeat it in court under oath?”

  He chuckled. “You mean, assuming you can find a way to haul this rotting carcass up there before I die?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A pause as he contemplated the question. “Would Conrad be there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Another chuckle. “I just might like that. I spent forty years in this hellhole while Conrad’s been living high on the hog, pretending he’s some goddamn saint, trying to forget I ever existed. I wouldn’t mind sitting in that witness chair and looking over at him in his fancy suit and saying, ‘Hey, Conrad, guess what? I’m ba-a-a-ck.’”

  His laughter turned into a phlegmy coughing fit, then wheezing, and then the tape ended.

  In the ensuing silence, I, too, had become a spectator. We all were. We followed Ruth’s stare. We stared at Conrad Beckman, willing him to look up, willing him to face this brave woman.

  And finally, he did. He lifted his head, his face empty, his eyes dead. He lifted his head and met Ruth’s gaze. They stared at one another for what seemed an eternity.

  And then he closed his eyes. He squeezed them shut.

  And then he lowered his head, lowered it until his forehead rested on his fists on the table.

  An eternity of silence. Judge Wagner cleared her throat. “Court will be in recess.”

  Epilogue

  Blame it on the movies. I’ve always dreamed of a Hollywood ending to one of my trials. In my fantasy case, I deliver a dazzling closing argument. There’s not a dry eye among the jurors as they file out of the courtroom to begin their deliberations. Twenty minutes later, they send in a note asking whether they can award my client more money than I asked for.

  But that’s Hollywood. This was reality. The trial ended abruptly during the recess.

  “You blew the film rights,” Benny later joked. Perhaps too soon. Only last week Ruth was approached by a producer with Touchstone.

  But I’m getting ahead of the story.

  The beginning of the end came with the arrest of Conrad Beckman. When the last juror filed out of the courtroom, two FBI agents stepped forward to cuff him and read him his rights. The front row of Beckman Engineering officials, already numb, sat there slack-jawed as the feds hauled off their leader with his hands cuffed behind his back.

  The docket clerk summoned the rest of us into chambers, where a stern Judge Wagner, still in her black robe, stood at the window, her arms crossed, looking as much like a hanging judge as a striking blonde possibly could. We took our seats quietly.

  She turned to the court reporter, who had just entered carrying her shorthand machine. “Wait outside,” she ordered.

  The court reporter nodded meekly, backing out of the room. I glanced around. Kimberly Howard looked absolutely crushed. Stanley Roth, defiant during our last meeting in chambers, seemed to have aged twenty years since then.

  “Folks,” Judge Wagner said, “the bailiff has the jury in the jury room, and that’s where they’ll stay through the lunch recess.” She paced behind her desk for a moment. “They’ll be sequestered for the rest of this trial. It’s the only way to avoid a mistrial. Conrad Beckman is already in custody. The U.S. Attorney has advised me that other arrests will follow.”

  She stopped and turned toward Stanley Roth. “You have exactly one hour to settle this case, Stanley. When that jury gets done with Beckman Engineering, there’ll be nothing left of that company but a spot of grease on the pavement. Make sure your client understands the severity of its peril.”

  He did. The case settled fifty-six minutes later for $70 million. Ruth’s share was a cool $21 million, and my fee was ridiculously high. During the three weeks since then, we’d been having fun giving lots of it away. So far, Ruth and I had established (1) an endowment in her uncle Harry’s name at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, (2) the Harry Rosenthal Scholarship Fund at the National Holocaust Museum; and (3) the Harry Rosenthal Memorial Fellowship at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center.

  Meanwhile, criminal proceedings had gone into hyper-drive on all fronts. The autopsy results on Herman Warnholtz revealed what I’d suspected: he’d been murdered. Last week an informer at Potosi implicated two other inmates, both members of a skinhead group with ties to Spider. Apparently, part of Bishop Kurt Robb’s quid pro quo for the Die Spinne funds was the duty to silence anyone who might reveal the source of those funds. Although it was still optimistic to expect him to go down for all of those homicides, he was in a whole world of hurt anyway. Jonathan’s grand jury had returned a multicount indictment of him and the upper echelon of Spider on various conspiracy and hate crime charges; moreover, the financial documents we’d found in the clocktower had roused the attention of that most dreaded of all legal juggernauts: the Internal Revenue Service. IRS agents literally put Robb and his organization out of business overnight by seizing every asset they could find, from bank accounts to office furniture to the computer system in Spider’s headquarters to the color television, VCR, and kiddie-porno videos in Robb’s bedroom.

  As for Conrad Beckman, I still wondered what must have gone through his mind at his deposition when I handed him Max Kruppa’s German letter. Did he feel as if he’d been yanked into another man’s biography or his own nightmare? Whatever his initial reaction, he’d have plenty of time to contemplate it. Murder has no statute of limitations, and that was only part of his criminal troubles. A federal grand jury was investigating criminal antitrust charges against Beckman and the other bid-rigging co-conspirators, and Jonathan’s sources within the Department of Justice said that Otto Koll was already singing like the proverbial canary while staff attorneys were passing out immunity to terrified Beckman Engineering employees like Christmas candy. Conrad Beckman would live out his days in prison.

  ***

  Although a seventy-million-dollar settlement is a victory to savor, I never got the chance. When I walked into my office on the morning after the trial ended, it seemed as if every client matter that had simmered patiently for weeks on the back burner started bubbling over. I was swamped, working twelve to fourteen hours a day for sixteen days straight, including weekends.

  And then, to my delight, Jonathan announced that he had an oral argument scheduled for a week from Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans. Did I want to join him down there for a couple of days?

  Yes!

  New Orleans.r />
  The perfect romantic getaway. An opportunity for two busy lawyers to step out of their crazy professional lives and give themselves a chance to decide whether to spend the rest of their lives together.

  New Orleans.

  It might even lure Jonathan Wolf out of his stuffed shirt. Although I’m hardly the Holly Golightly type, the last time I was in New Orleans, attending a section meeting of the ABA, I snuck out of the evening cocktail party with a girlfriend from my Harvard days who’s now the assistant general counsel of a major Philadelphia bank. We danced to zydeco music at the Cajun Cabin until two in the morning, shared a plate of beignets and several cups of café au lait with two drop-dead gorgeous musicians, and then, at three-thirty in the morning, headed off on the backs of their motorcycles for a party in the Warehouse District. We staggered into the morning committee meeting wearing the same clothes we’d worn the day before.

  Ah, New Orleans.

  So I booked us the honeymoon suite at Le Richelieu on Chartres in the heart of the French Quarter. The plan was for Jonathan to go down alone on Sunday to prepare for his argument, which was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. on Monday. I’d fly down in time to meet him for lunch in the French Quarter. And then, as I told Jonathan while I drove him to the airport early Sunday morning, we’d head back to the honeymoon suite for a serious discussion about sleeping arrangements.

  Oh, well.

  At least the plane arrived on time.

  When I stepped out of the cab at Bayona on Dauphine Street at noon on Monday in the chic new outfit I’d bought especially for the occasion, I was not alone.

  “Reservations for Wolf,” I told the maître d’.

  “Ah, yes, mademoiselle,” he purred, studying the reservations book with his reading glasses. “Monsieur is already here. Party of two?”

  “Party of four.”

  He peered down over the podium. “Ah, yes.”

  The maître d’ led the way back to a romantic corner booth, where the bottle of champagne was already on ice and two crystal glasses were reflecting the candlelight. The change of expression on Jonathan’s face was amusing to watch—from surprise to bewilderment to concern to delight.

  For there’d been a slight modification in plans. Jonathan’s housekeeper, who’d had the beginnings of what appeared to be a common cold on Saturday, was in the grips of a bad flu by late Sunday afternoon—fever, chills, bad cough, congestion, the works. She could no more take care of Jonathan’s two daughters than herself. Both of the backup sitters were out of town.

  “Daddy,” little Sarah shouted as she ran toward her father, “Rachel says we get to go on a real streetcar after lunch and then we can take a boat ride to the zoo.”

  He gave her a kiss on the top of her head and looked up at me with a twinkle in his eye. “Oh, really?”

  I nodded and held up the book I’d bought in the airport bookstore: A Child’s Guide to New Orleans.

  Leah came over and gave her father a hug. “Rachel says that Leah and I get to sleep with her in a fairy-tale bed with a canopy overhead.”

  “Is that so?” he said, looking over her head at me.

  “Where will you sleep, Daddy?”

  Momentarily unsure, he looked at her and then at me.

  I shrugged.

  He rubbed his beard.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  He winked.

  We both smiled.

  Author’s Note

  This is a novel. A work of fiction. It opens with the usual disclaimer about resemblances to actual persons, and well it should. There is no Conrad Beckman. There is no Herman Warnholtz. Nor, for that matter, was there ever a Death’s Head Formation in the United States, at least to my knowledge. But there was one in Germany, a Nazi division known as the SS-Totenkopfverbände, and they were indeed in charge of the concentration camps. So, too, there was a Die Spinne, consisting of former SS officers, and by all accounts it did survive Hitler’s fall.

  There was no Harold Roth, but there were undercover agents just like him, and the reports they filed on the American Nazi movement in St. Louis during the years before World War II still exist. In researching this novel, I spent several spooky afternoons paging through those yellowed archives. I read about the St. Louis chapter of the German-American Bund, with its headquarters in a two-story building at 2960 Oregon Avenue called the Clubhouse. I read an undercover report describing the celebration of Hitler’s birthday there on April 20, 1937, where Anton Kessler, fürer of the local storm troopers, introduced the guest speaker, Walter Kappe, propaganda chief of the Cincinnati chapter of the Bund. Herr Kappe posed the following question to the cheering audience: “Why shouldn’t the Gentile majority of St. Louis, defending itself against the Jewish Anti-American subversives, disfranchise Jewish voters, put them in the class of wards of the nation, and segregate them on reservations just like we did to our Indians?”

  There was a Hitler Youth Camp, which opened on July 4, 1938, near Stanton, Missouri, and there was a Deutsche-Horst family summer camp near Meramec River off Lemay Ferry Road. The July 23, 1939, issue of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch did indeed have a headline that read:

  10 ST. LOUIS BUND LEADERS

  HAVE GONE TO GERMANY

  And the article that ran beneath that headline is exactly as quoted in this novel. In the fall of 1939, Fritz Kuhn, national leader of Bund, did indeed travel to St. Louis to address a group of local storm troopers at the Liederkranz Club. The words he said there appear in this novel.

  And so on and so on.

  Although I know of no Conrad Beckman and I know of no Herman Warnholtz, I wouldn’t be surprised if their doppelgängers are among us. As Rachel said, sometimes we seem Time’s captives, running nowhere forever on ancient treadmills.

  I hope she’s wrong.

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