Bearing Witness (19 page)

Chapter Eighteen

“Why Hitler's birthday?” Benny asked.

I shrugged. “Seems as good a place as any to start.”

This was the last thing I had time for. It was Tuesday night—T-minus six days to trial—but I was totally consumed by the vision from that morning of Harold Roth in his easy chair. I had an eight-page list of pretrial tasks to complete by Monday morning, I was going to be in Jefferson City most of tomorrow, and I'd already given up an hour I didn't have tonight to drop by Jonathan's house to read his daughters a bedtime story and, in the process, to check on the level of police security in place during his absence. (He'd left for Jefferson City that afternoon.) My schedule was so hectic that my dinner tonight had been an apple and a Snickers bar on the drive to the library. But none of that mattered now. I was obsessed with Harold Roth's missing journal. I had to see whether I could reconstruct it, or at least certain parts of it, and Benny, God bless him, had agreed to help. We were in the main library at Wash U.

I gestured toward Harold Roth's last undercover report, the half page of typed material concerning his unsuccessful efforts to obtain information about the SS-Death's Head Formation unit in St. Louis. That was the report in which he repeated Herman Warnholtz's boast that his storm troopers were prepared to do violence in furtherance of the cause of Nazism.

“Why Hitler's birthday?” Benny asked again.

“Harold was kind of cagey, but he seemed to confirm that there was some act of violence—maybe more than one. When I asked when, he told me to focus on Nazi celebration days. What could be bigger than Hitler's birthday?”

Benny nodded thoughtfully. “It's worth a try.”

We were seated at one of the microfilm readers. Benny got up and went over to the file drawers filled with microfilm of issues of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
dating back to the 1920s. He turned to me and with a frown, “When was that scumbag born?”

“April 20, 1889.”

“April twenty,” he repeated as he kneeled down to study the dates on the file drawer labels. “Which year should we start with?”

I glanced at the date at the top of Harold Roth's final report:
February 27, 1942
,

“Nineteen forty-two,” I said.

Benny returned with a roll of microfilm and threaded it into the machine. “So if something happened on April twentieth,” he mused aloud as he used the fast-forward button to advance the film in starts and spurts, “it'd be reported in the April twenty-first edition.”

When one of his fast-forward spurts landed us in the middle of the features section for April 20, 1942, he slowly advanced the film until we were staring at the front page of the April 21 edition of the
Post-Dispatch
. The headline immediately yanked us back to World War II:

U.S. AND FILIPINO FORCES
FALL BACK IN PANAY BATTLE

SOVIET GAINS IN LENINGRAD
AND CENTRAL PARTS CLAIMED

We carefully scanned each page, looking for an act of violence that could somehow be linked to the American Nazis. As we moved through the newspaper, page by page, the black-and-white images pulled me back into an era before I was born, to a time that seemed in some ways more exotic than ancient Rome. All the men wore hats, the women gloves. Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music were held over at the Casa-Loma Ballroom on Cherokee, admission 50 cents. Wool sweaters were on sale at Stix, Baer & Fuller for $3.59, and “luxurious furs” were available at Scruggs•Vandervoort• Barney for $69.95. A fifth of Hiram Walker cost $1.79. The Esquire was showing Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in
Woman of the Year
. The Uptown had Robert Taylor and Lana Turner in
Johnny Eager
. According to the box scores, the Browns had beaten the Indians the day before, and the Cards had knocked off the Reds.

“Oh, Jesus,” Benny said quietly, pointing at the small headline on the screen.

The headline read:

MAN DIES IN PAWNSHOP FIRE
OFFICIALS SUSPECT ARSON

The story was just three paragraphs, cobbled together in time for the deadline. Myron Bernstein, owner of the Southside Pawnshop, had died when flames consumed his place of business late on the night of Monday, April 20. He was fifty-seven years old, married, and the father of five children, all grown. His wife said he usually stayed down after hours on Monday nights to count his inventory, do his books for the prior week, and go over his records. The article reported that the fire marshal and the police believed the fire was deliberately set, that the arson squad had opened a file, and that the police captain had assigned two homicide detectives to the matter. Nevertheless, the article was silent as to what had triggered that level of investigative activity so promptly.

The reasons began to emerge over the next several days of coverage as Benny and I followed the story on microfilm. The presence of several empty gasoline cans strewn around the store was strong evidence of arson. The homicide part was just as obvious: the dead man's feet and arms had been bound by baling wire. Then came the Nazi connection. On the day of the fire, a city desk reporter at the
Globe-Democrat
received an anonymous telephone call announcing that in honor of Adolf Hitler's birthday, “we're going to barbecue a fat Jewish pig tonight.” The reporter had dismissed it as a kook call—one of many he received each day—until he learned of the fire that night. The connection seemed clinched by the pair of dripping red swastikas painted on the outer side walls of the building.

The horrible crime possessed the city, or at least the newspaper, for several weeks. The mayor, the governor, and both U.S. senators denounced the crime and condemned the perpetrators. There were daily front-page updates on the investigation for nearly three weeks. But then, like most such crimes that aren't solved quickly, it dropped from view. The last investigation update appeared on May 27, 1942. We skimmed through another month's worth of newspapers but found no further mention of it.

With a sense of unease, we moved ahead one year to April 21, 1943. Had those Hitler celebrants struck again? But there was nothing in that day's edition of the
Post-Dispatch
or, for that, matter, the rest of the week. Nor was there any mention of the arson murder that had occurred the prior year. The institutional memory of a newspaper didn't seem to extend that far.

We checked the 1944 and 1945 editions as well, but Hitler's birthday seemed to have passed both years without incident.

“I wonder if they ever solved it,” I said to Benny as he rewound the roll of microfilm that included the edition for April 21, 1945.

“It could take us forever to find out,” Benny said. “There's no index for this microfilm.”

“I'll ask Jonathan. He has plenty of contacts with the police and prosecutors. Maybe one of the older guys will remember.”

Benny walked over to the file drawers and put the roll of microfilm back in its slot. “Any other Nazi holidays?” he asked.

“Let's try May first,” I said. “I read in one of those reports that Hitler declared May Day a Nazi holiday.”

Benny shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

But we came up empty. We searched through the first week in May for the years 1942 through 1945, but found no acts of violence that appeared to be in any way related to the American Nazis.

Benny turned to me as he held the rewind button for the May 1-15, 1945, roll. “
Nu?
”

I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms over my chest. I frowned in thought. “You know what that arson job reminded me of?”

“What?”

I gazed at Benny. “Kristallnacht.”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded solemnly. “When was it?”

“Sometime in the late thirties, right? Toward the end of the year, I think.”

We confirmed it with an encyclopedia. Kristallnacht, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” began on the evening of November 9/10, 1938. Joseph Goebbels's SS troops, urged on by his denunciations of the Jews, poured into the streets to wreak vengeance. Other Germans joined the SS troops, and soon an angry mob was raging through the streets in a frenzy of anti-Semitism. By the following morning, 91 Jews were dead and hundreds seriously injured, 177 synagogues were burned or demolished, and nearly 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed.

We started with 1942. Benny threaded the microfilm and advanced it until we were staring at the front page of the November 10, 1942, edition of the
Post-Dispatch:

YANKS TAKE ORAN; DARLAN CAPTURED

______________________________

Another American Column Drives
Toward Rommel Army in Libya

______________________________

Gen. Eisenhower's Mother Hopes
“Dwight Will Be Good,” Return Soon

We paged slowly through the issue, but there were no reports of any violent crime in St. Louis for the prior day. Or for any of the remaining days that week.

“Try one more year,” I told Benny.

He came back with the microfilm roll covering November 1 through 15, 1943. As I watched him thread it into the reader, I said, “Did I tell you that Harold Roth knew about San Carlos de Bariloche?”

Benny glanced over at me. “How?”

I shook my head. “He wouldn't say, but he guessed the town's name as soon as I told him about the joint venture in a South American resort town.”

“That's weird.”

I nodded. “It tells me that there's another piece of the puzzle we're missing. And remember, Beckman Engineering wasn't the only one involved in a joint venture down there. Beek Contracting did that floodwater system on the lake down there in 1968.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“That one was a money loser, too, according to my expert witnesses.”

Benny squinted at the screen, which was displaying the second page of the sports section for November 8, 1943. “Maybe I'll do some poking around tomorrow,” he said as he pressed the fast-forward button. “See if I can find out anything else about that town.”

“There,” I said as the film stopped at the front page for November 10, 1943. I pointed at a smaller headline near the bottom of the page:

Action In Boston Urged
On Tracts Against Jews

The one-paragraph blurb reported that the Massachusetts Public Safety Commissioner had urged Boston officials to confiscate anti-Semitic pamphlets in the wake of nearly forty assaults on Jews throughout the city over the past several weeks.

A small article on page three described a memorial service held for the German Jews who had perished on that night five years ago on Kristallnacht. The service had been lead by Rabbi Abram Levine of Temple Shalom. With a twinge of poignancy, I saw his portrait again—that face glaring into the camera, pipe clenched between his teeth, those dark bushy eyebrows over fierce eyes. It made me sad.

“I wonder whether Harold Roth was at that service,” I said.

Benny silently advanced the microfilm page by page. We found it on the first page of the city section:

JEWELER MURDERED ON SOUTH SIDE
POLICE SUSPECT NAZI SYMPATHIZERS

In a crime that had veteran police officers shaking their heads in shock, the unclothed corpse of a south side jeweler was dumped from a moving car outside the third district police headquarters at midnight last night. The corpse was riddled with bullet holes and painted with swastikas, the symbol of the German Nazis.

The victim was identified as Harry Rosenthal, age 51, of the 5900 block of Enright. Rosenthal was the proprietor of Mound City Jewelry on the 3200 block of South Meramec.

According to the police, a missing persons alert on Rosenthal had been issued by 9 p.m. after the police received a report from a passerby who claimed to have seen Rosenthal grabbed outside his jewelry store by a masked man around 6 p.m. The witness said that Rosenthal was dragged into the alley and shoved into a car, which promptly drove off.

Police Captain Clarence O'Bannion said that the list of suspects included every known Nazi sympathizer in the area. He said his investigators would begin bringing in suspects for questioning beginning today.

Rosenthal is survived by his mother, a sister, his wife and two sons.

***

I leaned back in my chair, numb. “That's Uncle Harry.”

Benny turned to me, aghast. “That poor guy was your uncle?”

I shook my head. “Not mine. Ruth's. The day I met her she had just said kaddish for him at the synagogue. Two Novembers ago.” I pointed toward the screen, where the date at the top of the newspaper page was visible. November 10, 1943. “We first met on Uncle Harry's
yabrzeit
.”

Chapter Nineteen

It was soon apparent that the main value of my trip to Jefferson City was the solitude on the train. No phones, no interruptions, no distractions. I'd stuffed my briefcase with trial preparation materials and got more done on that two-and-a-half-hour train ride than I would have accomplished in a whole day at the office.

As for the sole purpose of the trip, it took less than thirty minutes with the Missouri Trade Commission's file on Beckman Engineering to conclude that its 1978 investigation had nothing to do with the claims in my case. Apparently, some eager staff attorney named Robert Hennepin—no doubt an ambitious recent grad with a fuzzy grasp of antitrust law—decided that Beckman Engineering's acquisition of a small engineering firm in Cape Girardeau posed a threat to free enterprise in southeast Missouri. Regardless of the merits of his concerns, it didn't take long for a platoon of lawyers from Roth & Bowles to hit the beach armed with reports, charts, and affidavits from a Princeton economist and a University of Chicago professor of law. They drove their Sherman tanks right over poor Mr. Hennepin, leaving treadmarks across his back.

At least I was able to make good use of the extra time. I spent about an hour in the law library in the Missouri Supreme Court building running down a few legal issues in Ruth's case, and then I located an open phone in the attorney room and spent another hour collecting and returning my phone calls. I caught up with Jonathan around three-thirty. He was still meeting with Paulie Metzger, so I took a seat in the waiting room outside the small conference room and pulled out another sheaf of pretrial materials.

At four-fifteen the door opened. I didn't need a name tag to identify the fat, balding man in his late sixties who stepped out of the room shaking his head in exasperation. Paulie Metzger was wearing a plaid sports jacket, wrinkled brown slacks, and scuffed black shoes. He had a pencil mustache, a Mr. McGoo nose, and an unlit cigar clenched in his teeth.

A moment later, Jonathan appeared in the doorway, his tie loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He crossed his arms over his chest as he leaned against the doorjamb and stared at Metzger's back.

“Your choice, Paulie,” he said.

“Come on, Wolf,” Metzger said in a raspy voice as he turned to Jonathan. “How many times I gotta tell you? I'm just the lawyer for the trust here.”

“Save your speech for the parole board, Paulie. You're as much a suspect as any of them. Today's Wednesday. The offer stays open until sundown Friday.”

“Sundown? What are you—Wyatt Earp?” And then he chuckled. “Oh, yeah, the Jew Sabbath, right?” He turned with a dismissive wave. “Don't hold your breath, Wolf.”

I watched him board the elevator. When the doors slid closed, I turned to Jonathan. “What a creep.”

Jonathan pursed his lips together and nodded.

“Any luck?”

He shrugged. “We'll see. I gave him some heavy stuff to mull over.”

On the drive home from Jefferson City I brought Jonathan up to date on the Harold Roth situation. He already knew Harold was dead—I'd told him yesterday before he left for Jefferson City—but the two homicides from the 1940s were news to him. I read him the articles I'd photocopied from the microfilm. He was intrigued. As we headed east on Highway 70, he called one of his contacts with the St. Louis police and asked him to see what he could find out about the results of the two homicide investigations.

***

What is it?” I asked.

We were about fifty miles outside St. Louis. Jonathan had been checking his rearview mirror with concern. I turned around to look. In the falling darkness I could make out a brown GMC van about a hundred feet behind us.

“Probably nothing,” he said. “It's been back there since we left Jefferson City. Can you read the license plate?”

I squinted. “Looks like an Illinois plate, but it's too dirty to read.”

Twenty minutes later, it was night. We'd just passed St. Charles and were now on the outskirts of St. Louis. The highway traffic was moving smoothly in the dark.

The first hint of peril came just beyond the Lindbergh exits off 1-70. We were in the right lane and I was flipping through the radio stations in search of a good song.

“What's this?” Jonathan mumbled.

I turned to watch as a van pulled into the middle lane, passed us, and pulled back into our lane right in front of us.

“Is that the same one?” I asked.

He nodded. “Look at the plates.”

Illegible Illinois plates, covered with mud.

As we approached the airport exit, a large pickup truck pulled into the middle lane directly alongside our car. A quarter mile, a half mile—it was keeping exact pace with us. I glanced over at the speedometer: 64 miles per hour.

“What's going on?” I said, peering through Jonathan's window at the pickup. It was a dark-colored vehicle with a raised cab. The passenger window was opaque.

We had just entered the intricate network of overpasses at the I-70/I-170 interchange when our car was bathed in light, as if someone had set off a phosphorescent flare in the backseat. I turned and squinted into huge headlights. They were less than ten feet from the rear fender. I looked at Jonathan just as the headlights behind us jumped from high beam to spotlight. Momentarily blinded, Jonathan lowered his head to avoid the glare.

“Look out!” I yelled, pointing ahead.

The brake lights on the van in front had just come on. As Jonathan moved his foot off the gas toward the brakes, the pickup truck whipped to the right and rammed into us hard, knocking our car onto the shoulder. Jonathan's window exploded into a thousand pieces. The wind howled as broken glass whistled through the car.

Jonathan had both hands on the steering wheel, fighting for control.

The pickup rammed us again. Our car careened to the right, wheels squealing.

“No!” I shouted, grasping for the dashboard as the car smashed through the guardrail.

We were airborne—

plunging—

the night sky above us—

below us—

above us—

then a crashing jolt…

***

I opened my eyes to the wailing.

There was a blurry image in front of me.

A tombstone?

I blinked.

A tombstone.

An upside-down tombstone, half sunk at an angle in the upside-down snow. A brightly illuminated tombstone. It cast a long, stark shadow.

I blinked again. The tombstone was still there. So was the loud wailing.

My brain seemed to be operating in slow motion. Gradually I realized the wailing sound was actually a car horn. I wasn't dead. The tombstone wasn't upside down. I was.

Something was pushed hard against me. I looked down—or was it up?—and felt with my hands. My sluggish brain processed the information: an inflated air bag was pressed against my body, holding it in place. I was strapped inside a car upside down, suspended by the seat belt.

I stared out at the tombstone. The faded engraving was all but unreadable, especially upside down. I could only make out the first name—
Jeremiah
—and the date of birth:
March 8, 1897
.

My head was throbbing. My neck was stiff. My hands were cold. Numb.

The wind was blowing. An icy winter breeze. I could feel it against my face, on my hands, ruffling my hair. The windshield was gone. Crystallized pieces of glass clung from the corners nearest me.

“Rachel?”

It was a whisper, barely audible over the howling. At first I thought I was hearing voices—words from inside my head.

“Rachel?”

The voice was familiar. I frowned.

The wailing. The car horn. Jonathan's car horn. Jonathan's car.

Jonathan!

I turned my head, grimacing from the pain.

“Oh, no,” I moaned. “Oh, Jonathan.”

He was suspended at an odd angle by his seat belt, his upper torso crammed against the steering wheel. The roof had partially caved in on his side. His air bag hadn't inflated. He turned his head toward me. There was blood on his forehead, blood in his hair, blood dripping slowly down—up?—onto the roof of the car.

“Rachel?” he asked softly.

“It's me, Jonathan. Oh, my God.”

“Tell me what hurts.”

“What hurts?” I paused, and did an inventory. “My head. My neck.”

“Is anything broken?”

“What?”

“Try your arms and legs. Can you move them?”

I tried. I could. “They're okay. But what about you?”

He winced. “My left wrist is broken. Maybe my ankle, too. The right one.”

“Oh, Jonathan.”

“My phone has to be somewhere.”

“I'll find it for us.” I slid my hand down along the shoulder harness, looking for the buckle. “Oh, Jonathan, I'll get us help. Don't worry. You'll be okay. I promise.”

It took me a full five minutes to unlatch the seat belt, brace myself against the roof, wrench the door open, and drag myself through it onto the frozen ground. I kneeled in the snow, drenched in perspiration as I tried to catch my breath. By the time I'd stopped panting, I was shivering. It took no time for the frigid air to seep through my silk blouse, gabardine skirt, stockings, and loafers. My coat was still in the car. I'd slipped it off on the drive back. My teeth were chattering as I crawled halfway into the car to retrieve it. Standing in the snow, I fumbled with the coat buttons, my fingers nearly crippled from the cold.

I climbed back in the car and checked on Jonathan. Fortunately, he'd kept his winter coat on during the drive. He told me he wasn't cold, but I didn't know whether to believe him.

I gave him a gentle kiss on his ear. “Hang on, Jonathan. I'll find the phone and call for help.”

I searched inside the car but couldn't find it. I clambered out and stood up to survey the area. Although the car's engine had died upon impact, the headlights remained on, and they were illuminating a scene right out of a low-budget horror flick. The car had come to rest in the middle of Washington Park Cemetery, the run-down graveyard near the airport where several generations of poor black families are interred. The headlights were creepy stage lighting for the dilapidated burial grounds.

Massaging the back of my sore neck, I tried to get my bearings. The path of the car would likely dictate the location of any items flung from it. High above the cemetery grounds, the highways crisscrossed on their overpasses, the exit and entrance ramps looping in big sweeping arcs. I located the smashed guardrail. The rest of the path was easy to trace from the trail of broken glass, debris, and slide marks below. The car had tumbled down the embankment, hit a concrete drainage ditch, and flipped over, landing on its roof in the snow. It slid through the cemetery, barely missing several grave markers before coming to rest right in front of Jeremiah's half-buried tombstone.

After twenty minutes of searching—during which I came across my purse and Jonathan's sunglasses—I found his phone half buried in the snow on the near side of the drainage ditch. Stumbling through the snow, I carried it back to the car and kneeled in front of one of the headlights to see what I was doing. Holding my breath, I flipped the phone open and pressed the Power button. Nothing at first, and then the little number screen lit up, blinked several times, and flashed
Ready
.

I exhaled slowly. “Thank you,” I whispered as I pressed *55, the emergency number for the Highway Patrol.