Bearing Witness (20 page)

Chapter Twenty

The emergency-room physician told me Jonathan never lost consciousness. Although he had suffered a severe concussion and a gash in his scalp when the car flipped over, along with a broken wrist, a broken ankle, and internal bruising, he'd remained conscious the whole time. Apparently, that was a good sign. The best sign, though, was that he was about to be transferred from intensive care to a regular hospital bed where I'd finally get to see him. By comparison, I'd come through the accident practically unscathed. Just a contusion on my forehead and a stiff neck that probably wasn't whiplash.

Jonathan had certainly been conscious when the Highway Patrol and ambulance arrived. Indeed, by the time the ambulance reached the hospital, the paramedics had already called ahead, at Jonathan's insistence, for two homicide detectives. Although the emergency-room physician refused to let the police near the patient until he'd been stitched and X-rayed, his broken bones set, and his condition stabilized, as soon as the doctor gave the okay, the detectives filed in with their notebooks and recorders.

I'd slept for about two hours on a waiting-room couch after the emergency-room physician came out to give me a status report at four a.m. The detectives woke me at 6:45 a.m. after they interviewed Jonathan. One of them was Poncho Israel, a huge black man with the build of an aging offensive tackle and a perpetually melancholy expression. We knew each other from a prior case.

Poncho tugged at his Fu Manchu mustache as he spoke. “An incident like that,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “car smashing through a railing, the Highway Patrol should get half a dozen calls from passersby on car phones. But not here. No one noticed a thing. That's how they planned it, Rachel. Those trucks did more than pin you in. They screened you from view.”

“Skinheads?” I asked.

“Maybe, but Mr. Wolf put a lotta punks behind bars during his prosecutor years. Some of them don't believe in letting bygones be bygones, especially now that he's no longer in the U.S. Attorney's office.”

“Come on, Poncho,” I said, shaking my head stubbornly, “it has to be the skinheads. They know he's tracing their source of funds. That's why he was down in Jeff City. They know he's coming after them, and they're getting nervous.” I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at both detectives. “That pickup truck has paint from Jonathan's car scraped along the passenger side. And don't forget about the brown van with the Illinois plates. Find one of those trucks and I'll bet you'll trace it right back to Spider.”

***

At the pay phone down the hall from his hospital room, I called Jonathan's housekeeper again to give her a status report. Then I called my secretary to explain why I'd be in late.

“What can I do?”

“I'll be okay,” I said, studying my pocket calendar. “You and Benny keep pressing ahead on the pretrial stuff. See if we can move the prep session with Steiner to after lunch, okay?”

“Oh, my God, Rachel.”

“Hang in there, Jacki. We'll pull through this.”

Jonathan was still asleep when I tiptoed back into the hospital room. He was on his back with his arms at his side and his right leg suspended in a canvas sling about a foot above the mattress. The ankle cast ran from his foot to his knee. His left arm was in a cast up to the elbow. There were bruises on his face, his left eye was blackened, and his head was wrapped in gauze. He had an IV drip in his right arm and several monitor wires running from different parts of his body to a bank of machines on a cart beside the bed. Nevertheless, he seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Thank goodness.

As quietly as I could, I lowered myself into the chair next to his bed and closed my eyes. Not to sleep, even though I was totally exhausted. No, I closed my eyes to shut off the turmoil for just a moment. It didn't work. I seemed to be running on autopilot somewhere out there along the edge of chaos. I'd just survived an assassination attempt on Jonathan and an automobile crash right out of a stuntman's bad dream. It was the kind of night that merited at least a week of recovery time, preferably on a warm beach somewhere in the Caribbean. Instead, I had the biggest trial of my life starting in four days. Faced with far too many pretrial tasks for the hours remaining, I didn't have time to do what any normal person ought to do: enjoy a tidy little mental breakdown. I didn't even have time to do what I really wanted to do: collapse into someone's arms sobbing hysterically. Worse yet, the only person whose arms I wanted to collapse into had a cast on one and bandages on the other. So I did the next best thing: I sat there with my eyes closed and wallowed in self-pity.

“Good morning, Rachel.”

I opened my eyes. His were open, too. They looked drained. I stood and leaned over him, banishing my selfish thoughts.

“Hi,” I whispered. I kissed him softly on his nose.

“How's your head?” he asked.

“Just a bump.” I shook my head nonchalantly, trying to conceal my neck pain. “It's nothing.”

I gently laid my hand on his chest. He looked battered and worn, but he also looked resolute. I thought of his Golden Gloves days. He looked like he'd been pummeled hard for the first eleven rounds but was determined to answer the final bell.

“How bad does it hurt?” I asked.

“I can't tell. They have me on painkillers.”

“Oh, Jonathan.”

“Don't worry. It'll be worth it.”

I gave him a puzzled look. “What will?”

“This.” With an effort, he turned his head to look down at his casts. He looked back at me, his green eyes fatigued but unyielding.

“What do you mean?”

“They're not clever enough to cover all their tracks. We'll find them. We'll hunt them down and find them, and when we do, we'll follow the chain of command right to the top. What they tried last night translates to two counts of attempted murder. That'll put Kurt Robb behind bars for life. Then we squeeze Paulie Metzger again, cut off their source of funds, and Spider is history.”

A doctor on rounds arrived just then. With mild amusement I watched Jonathan reverse the usual physician/patient interaction. The doctor started off with the “good news” that we “might be able to go home by the end of the week.” By the time he left the room ten minutes later, he'd agreed that Jonathan was going home at the end of the day.

Kurt Robb had reason to be jittery.

***

I got to my office at noon. Between the phone calls from friends and the inquiries from the press, I was able to do about two hours of actual trial preparation before I left the office at six o'clock.

I'd originally planned to go back to the hospital to help Jonathan get home, but discovered by midafternoon that I'd just be in the way. The Missouri Attorney General, sensing a significant photo op, decided to personally escort Jonathan out of the hospital and transport him home in an official state of Missouri limo with a five-motorcycle police escort. Jonathan was big news, and the attorney general—a politician to his core, with designs on higher office—was eager to bask in the media spotlight. He staged an “impromptu” press conference on the hospital steps. As the videocams whirred, he reared up on his hind legs, denounced the incident as “an attempted assassination,” and vowed “to bring down the sword of justice upon the cowardly necks of the fiends responsible for this abomination, as God is my witness.”

So I skipped the circus and drove straight to Jonathan's house to help prepare his daughters for their father's homecoming. The housekeeper had wisely shielded the girls from all media reports of the incident. All they knew was that Daddy had been in an automobile accident and had broken an arm and a leg. It turned out that that's all they needed to know. When Jonathan came through the door, moving smoothly on crutches and smiling at his daughters, it seemed inconceivable that less than twenty-four hours ago he'd been hanging upside down in his car, battered and barely conscious. The gauze had been unwrapped from his head and replaced by a large bandage placed on his forehead at an angle that made it seem almost jaunty. The cuts and bruises seemed less raw, and the black eye didn't look quite as prominent now that he had his color back.

I felt a little like the fifth wheel at the joyous family reunion, so after we got him settled on the couch in the living room with a cup of hot chocolate and his daughters at his side, I kissed him good-bye and said I'd call him in the morning. On the way to my car, I noted with approval the augmented security arrangements. There were now two state Highway Patrol cars parked in front of the house and two plainclothes officers with crackling walkie-talkies moving down the driveway. It was the first worthwhile thing the attorney general had done all day.

***

Benny taught an evening seminar on trade regulation and dropped by afterward to cheer me up with massive quantities of Chinese takeout, including an entire container of Mongolian Beef for Ozzie. Suffice to say, Ozzie treats Benny with a degree of veneration that one normally associates with the disciples of a charismatic religious leader. In Ozzie's world, Benny was the Dalai Lama.

Benny hung around to catch the ten o'clock news. Jonathan was the lead story. Fortunately, I was just the nameless “other attorney accompanying Mr. Wolf” who “escaped with minor injuries.” There was footage of the attorney general making his vows on the hospital steps.

“Give me a break,” Benny groaned after the attorney general made his vow. “Sword of justice? That knucklehead couldn't find his own butt with both hands and a copy of
Gray's Anatomy
.”

The piece ended with a live remote of Bishop Kurt Robb outside the Spider headquarters, wearing his green beret and tinted glasses.

“That's preposterous,” Robb said with a chuckle when asked if he was aware that the attorney general had targeted his organization as a suspect in the accident, “but I'm hardly surprised. That so-called attorney general is nothing more than a rank hairball coughed up on the carpet of Missouri politics. You don't have to be paranoid to wonder if this whole accident was staged.” He turned to face the camera, by now in complete control of the live interview. “And here's something else to ask yourself. A man driving along the highway crashes through the guardrail and goes over the edge. What's your first thought? Alcohol, right?” He smiled and shrugged. “I wouldn't be at all surprised if they discovered a little too much Mogen David in his bloodstream.” He turned to the reporter. “Well?”

The question caught the reporter off balance. “Pardon?”

“Have you asked the attorney general, madam? He's hurling around some serious charges. Have you bothered to ask him the blood alcohol level of the Big Bad Wolf?”

She stammered. “Uh, that's a subject, well, uh, not that I know.”

He turned back to the camera and shook his head sarcastically. “This is freedom of the press? What a sorry state of affairs.”

Chapter Twenty-one

Legal fictions were part of the world of law long before publishers named a category after them. Those original fictions—the true fictions, if you will—have always been more powerful than the ones that jostle for space on the bestseller lists. That's because legal fictions are at the core of the law, and the core of the law is metamorphosis. Consider the corporation, a golem created out of inanimate objects as if from a witch's brew: take a set of cryptic phrases, add three whereas clauses, stir in a special corporate seal, and—presto—the thing lives! Or observe the alchemy of the libel action, where that ethereal abstraction known as a person's reputation is transmuted into a tangible piece of property.

Metamorphosis comprised the first order of business Monday morning when the thirty-six designated men and women filed into the courtroom. They were a motley collection—young and old, fat and skinny, black and white, urban, suburban, and rural; some with graduate degrees, some without high school diplomas. But inside the courtroom they were no longer ordinary folk. Now they were the “venire,” ready for the voir dire. At the end of that process, six would undergo the final transformation by raising their right hands, repeating the enchanted words, and—presto—they'd become the engine of justice charged with determining Ruth Alpert's fate in the trial of
United States ex rel. Ruth B. Alpert
v.
Beckman Engineering Co
.

Although jury selection in a federal civil case is usually a streamlined process, there was nothing usual about this case. It would take all morning to cull through the venire panel for our six jurors plus one alternate because Judge Wagner would be asking each prospective juror a list of forty-six questions carefully designed by a team of psychologists and sociologists at Trial•Edge, the Chicago jury selection consultants retained by Beckman Engineering.

As the morning droned on, I studied the prospective jurors, hoping that they were picking up the contrast between the plaintiff's counsel table and the defendant's. Facing the jury at the defendant's table were Kimberly Howard; her unctuous aide de camp Laurence Browning; one of Roth & Bowles's interchangeable young male associates; a harried female paralegal; and Conrad Beckman, today attired in the standard first-day-of-trial outfit: an impeccable dark suit, starched white shirt, and power tie. Seated on the other side of the defendant's table were two consultants from Trial•Edge, another young male attorney, and another harried paralegal.

The two consultants were frenetically typing coded data into their laptop computers as each prospective juror answered the questions on the list. That data was being transmitted to a more powerful computer in the back of the courtroom manned by another pair of consultants, one of whom was wearing a headset that kept him in contact with a support team at another location. The mother computer was processing the data and updating lists of Top 6 and Bottom 6 prospective jurors, which it transmitted to the screen of the laptop computer on the table in front of Laurence Browning.

From my seat at the plaintiff's table, I could see the lists roll and change on Browning's computer like the flight departure boards at O'Hare. I'd heard that Trial•Edge had been conducting jury pool surveys and focus group studies on the case for more than a month. By the time this trial was over, Beckman Engineering would have paid them over $150,000, which was more than their opening settlement offer to Ruth. With all the technicians, lawyers, and paralegals involved, the defendant's jury selection operation seemed like a miniversion of the NASA launch team in Houston.

Over at our table, Mission Control consisted of Ruth and me.

Period.

We didn't have the money for consultants or laptops loaded with proprietary software. So we did our jury selection the way it had been done for centuries: by intuition. We listened as each prospective juror answered the judge's questions and then we jotted down not-so-coded data onto our lowtech notepads—sophisticated, calibrated observations, such as
Maybe?
and
He gives me bad vibes
and
Yes!
and
Don't trust a woman with that hairdo
and
No way!

Occasionally, as the morning dragged along, I glanced back to the gallery and tried to pick out members of the press. Scattered throughout the ten rows of benches in the courtroom were a dozen or so reporters, some of whom I recognized, including the local stringers for the
Wall Street Journal
and
BusinessWeek
. Last Friday, as part of a flurry of final pretrial orders, Judge Wagner opened the proceeding to the public. The unsealing of a court file involving claims exceeding $100 million against a major St. Louis corporation snagged the attention of the local media and some of the nationals. The
Post-Dispatch
ran a big article on the case in the Sunday business section. I'd received a call late Friday afternoon from a reporter with
Forbes
magazine, which had ranked Beckman Engineering last year as one of the fifty best-run private corporations in America. She was somewhere out there in the crowd.

At twelve-thirty, Kimberly and I went up to the bench for our last voir dire sidebar with Judge Wagner. We each handed Her Honor a slip of paper with our final preemptory strikes. She looked at them, nodded, and gestured us back to our seats. She conferred a moment with her clerk and her bailiff, and then turned toward the group of prospective jurors, which had been whittled from thirty-six to twenty-two.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Judge Wagner said, “if I call yourname, please take the seat I indicate in the jury box. Mr. Fernandez, seat one. Miss Deutsch, seat two—”

As she called out their names, they stood self-consciously, one by one, and filed into the jury box to take their assigned seat, which was the seat they would occupy for each day of the trial.

“Mrs. Trotter, seat three. Miss Jahnke, seat four. Mr. Hagen, seat five—”

When they were all seated and facing the bench, Judge Wagner turned to the ones left behind, thanked them for their patience, and told them to report back to the clerk's office after lunch. As the unchosen filed out of the courtroom, I turned my gaze toward the jury box and studied them, this jury of our peers. I couldn't help but wonder if all those fancy consultants at Trial•Edge felt any less unsure of these seven men and women than I did.

Judge Wagner had the jury stand, raise their right hands, and be sworn in.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she said after they were seated again, “the Court will be in recess until two o'clock, at which time the trial will begin with opening statements. Let me remind you that you are not to discuss the case among yourselves or with anyone else from now until the case is over. The bailiff will now show you to the jury room.” She paused and gave them a friendly smile. “We'll see you at two o'clock. Have a good lunch.”

Benny was waiting for Ruth and me in the hallway outside the courtroom. Ruth was meeting one of her girlfriends for lunch, which was what I had suggested this morning, since I knew I would need some time alone to get ready for opening statements. I'd told her to meet me in the courtroom at a quarter to two.

I filled Benny in on the morning's proceedings as we walked over to Crackers for soup and a sandwich. We still weren't ready for trial, of course. I still had investigators out there looking for potential witnesses, and my opening statement consisted of one page of hastily scribbled notes.

We got a booth in the back of the restaurant and placed our orders. When the waitress left, Benny leaned forward and said, “I found some intriguing stuff on our little resort town.”

“San Carlos?” I said, wavering between curiosity and dread. I was curious to learn whether Benny had discovered the town's mysterious connection to Ruth's case, but I dreaded the thought that his news might further complicate this far-too-complicated case.

“I started with Nexus,” he said. Nexus is a computer data bank that contains full-text articles from hundreds of newspapers and periodicals.

“Any hits?” I asked.

He nodded as he pulled a folded set of papers out of his jacket pocket. “Four. Three were exactly what you'd expect: features in travel magazines on South American resorts. But check out the fourth.”

He handed me a sheet of paper. It was a photocopy of an article that had appeared in the October 30, 1995, issue of the
New York Times
. The story described an awkward public relations problem confronting “this picturesque ski town.” Erich Priebke, a prominent local citizen was under house arrest while the Argentine Supreme Court tried to decide whether he would be extradited to Italy to stand trial for his participation in the killing of 336 Italian civilians at the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome in 1944. Apparently, during World War II the charming Señor Priebke had been Captain Priebke of the German SS.

If it were only Priebke, the article explained, the residents could shrug it off as one bad apple. But what made the town's leaders so uneasy was the way the controversy focused attention on a dark chapter of the history of San Carlos de Bariloche. According to the
Times
, the town had once been a “haven for Nazis who fled Germany after World War II.” In particular, it was rumored to have been a sanctuary for former SS officers involved in the operations of the concentration camps.

I looked up at Benny in astonishment. “I can't believe this.”

Benny nodded. “Neither could I. I ran another computer search through one of those oddball databases.” He unfolded the other two pages. “This appeared back in 1972 in some Jewish publication called
Jacob's Review
. It's from an article on the novel
The Odessa File
. By the way, did you know that there really was an organization called Odessa?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Benny looked at the first page. “The name is an acronym. I can't remember the German, but in English it stands for the Organization of Former Members of the SS. Do you remember that thing Harold Roth mentioned to you? Die Spinne?”

“Sure.”

“I thought it was a curse. You know, like ‘Die Motherfucker.' And maybe it is, but the only guy named Spinne I could find was some Danish composer from the seventeenth century.”

“What would they have against him?”

Benny shrugged. “Beats me. The next closest word I found was spinney, which is a small forest. Die Forest?” He shook his head. “Doesn't make sense. But check this out.”

I flattened the pages on the table and read the paragraphs that Benny had highlighted with a yellow marker:

The most formidable of the other secret confederations was Die Spinne comprised of officers in the SS-Totenkopfverbände (the SS-Death's Head Formation), the storm-trooper division in charge of the concentration camps. By 1944, many of the senior officers of the Death's Head Formation, aware that the war was lost and under no illusions as to how they would be treated afterward, made secret arrangements to escape and carry on Hitler's plans. In late 1944, at a secret conference at the Maison Rouge hotel in Strausbourg, Die Spinne was established. According to papers found in a dark blue envelope taken off an SS colonel in the internment camp at Ebensee, the chairman of the conference made the following statement:

The battle of France is lost for Germany. Steps must be taken for a postwar underground campaign to achieve by clandestine means what we have failed to achieve by open war. We must seek and establish contact and links with sympathetic foreign firms and be prepared for taking up large-scale credits after the war if our goals are ever to be achieved.”

I looked up at Benny in wonder. “This is incredible.”

He nodded. “Read on.”

I looked down at the text:

By the end of 1944, Die Spinne had established safe houses, forged papers, trained guides and go-betweens, plotted routes for border crossings, and arranged for sanctuaries in Spain and Italy, often in monasteries. The main escape route, known as the “B-B axis,” ran from the town of Bremen to the Italian port of Bari, and from there to Spain and South America.

Members of Die Spinne all had proper papers and arrived at their new destinations with substantial financial resources at their disposal to enable them to become partners in major enterprises. This was due, in no small part, to the meticulous records of assets maintained by the Death's Head Formation of the wealth confiscated from the concentration camp prisoners. In May of 1945, according to records seized by the invading Russian army, a special department of the Reichsbank sent several crates of “dental gold,” valued at $5 million, to the Aussee area of Germany, where it was shipped to a bank and then transferred to San Carlos de Bariloche, a mountain village in Argentina that was rumored to be the international headquarters for Die Spinne.

I put the pages down and looked at Benny, “Is it possible?” I said, my head reeling. I checked my watch. “Oy,” I said, reaching for one of the halves of my tuna sandwich, “I've got my opening statement in thirty minutes.” I shook my head and leaned back in the booth. “Oh, Benny, there's too many loose ends.”

“What can I do?”

I tried to give him a plucky smile. “How about writing a note from my mother. ‘Dear Judge Wagner: Please excuse Rachel from Court this afternoon. She's not feeling well.'”

Benny smiled and reached across to punch me gently in the arm. “You'll be awesome. The jury'll love you. Now what can I do to help?”

I gestured toward the article I'd just read. “Check with one of our students. Maybe Josh. See if he can run those two dates through the computer.”

“Which dates?”

I finished the sandwich half and took a sip of iced tea. “The ones we found in the
Post-Dispatch
: April 21, 1942, and November 11, 1943. Have him check the newspapers in the other five cities.”