The Trial of Fallen Angels (18 page)

23

T
he presentation of Amina Rabun begins immediately, before I can protest the selection of Hanz Stössel as her counsel and make a motion for his disqualification.

The Courtroom vanishes, and in the same manner as the theater-like presentation of Toby Bowles, we are deposited into another scene from Amina Rabun’s life. This particular scene is set inside the publisher’s office of a small newspaper called
The Cheektowaga Register
in a suburb of Buffalo, New York. Amina sits behind the desk with the door closed, talking on the telephone. She is wearing a white linen blouse and a heather skirt. A table fan runs quietly in the background.

Amina occupies this office because Hanz Stössel himself had advised her that, as an immigrant and a single woman with no employable skills but considerable wealth, she should consider purchasing a business to occupy both her money and her mind. He recommended a florist’s shop or perhaps a boutique, nothing too taxing or complicated; but Amina heard that the newspaper was being sold under financial duress and thought that owning a paper would be more interesting. She had intended to retain the publisher to continue running the operation, but soon found herself disagreeing with his editorial judgment and fired him. Rather than hire somebody new, she decided to learn the newspaper business and take over operations herself. It would be a fresh start for her life and perhaps help her integrate into her adopted homeland. Who was more respected in a community than the publisher of the local paper?

Amina shakes her head while speaking on the telephone. She threatens the newsprint salesman on the other end with cancellation of her contract if he fails to match the ten-percent discount offered by a competitor. The salesman, a French Canadian, struggles to understand the English words tangled in Amina Rabun’s German accent.

During this conversation, there is a knock and the office door opens. A large man with black lacquered hair appears at the threshold. Behind him, the newsroom buzzes with ringing telephones and reporters busily talking and typing at their desks. The man standing in the doorway strikes an imposing presence, but he appears apprehensive, as though he knows he is about to encounter a foe even more formidable than himself. Dark wings of perspiration spread across his blue dress shirt, but this is not necessarily from nervousness. The temperature both inside and out is eighty-eight degrees with one hundred percent relative humidity—a meteorological constant of western New York in the summertime.

The man takes in a deep breath, puffing his cheeks into small pink balloons. With his right hand, he mops a soggy handkerchief across his smooth forehead. In his left hand, he holds a long cardboard cylinder, the type used by architects to carry blueprints. While waiting for Amina to finish her call, his blue eyes wander ahead into the office like a pair of bottle flies, coming to rest on a beautiful Tiffany lamp in the corner. They caress the colorful glass petals and measure their value, then fly off to a framed black-and-white photograph of Amina’s parents on their wedding day and an engraved plaque naming
The Cheektowaga Register
the best small-town newspaper in New York in 1958. His eyes come to rest on a painting on the white wall behind Amina’s desk.

This painting is an extraordinarily valuable work of art, more likely to be found hanging in a museum than a publisher’s office. It is an original oil painting by the French Impressionist master Edgar Degas, and was a gift to Amina from a man, much like the man admiring it from the doorway, who also happened to find himself in the same predicament. Degas’s subjects in the painting are a bristly-bearded father dressed in a light overcoat and black top hat enjoying a cigar as he strolls along the edge of a Parisian park with his two handsomely dressed daughters and their dog, all moving in opposite directions at once. When Amina enters the office each morning and sees the painting, she recalls strolling with her own father on Saturday mornings along Dresden’s broad boulevards to the offices of Jos. A. Rabun & Sons, and then to a small café for lunch. Sometimes in the café she would meet Katerine Schrieberg and her father.

Against a wall in Amina’s office adjacent to the Degas painting stands a polished walnut case filled with copies of four books of poetry published by Bette Press, the company Amina formed when she acquired the newspaper. She named the entity in honor of her young cousin who had been raped and murdered in Kamenz. The bindings of each of these four books bear in gold leaf the Bette Press colophon—a square imprint of a little girl eternally fixed in mid-swing beneath the thick branches of a poplar tree, her hair and dress rippled softly by a breeze. The original wood carving of this colophon, still stained with ink from the first run of cover pages, rests on top of the bookcase. It is the work of master printer Albrecht Bosch, who studied at the Bauhaus School before fleeing the Nazis to Chicago. Mr. Bosch convinced Amina to print books alongside her newspaper and to employ him as her production manager. The design of the colophon, inspired by an early photograph of Bette Rabun, did all the persuading that was necessary.

The newsprint salesman at the other end of the telephone finally grasps the meaning of Amina’s words and concedes the ten-percent discount, all of which, he wishes her to know, will come out of his commission. She thanks him for the gesture but feels no gratitude or sympathy.
The Cheektowaga Register
is his largest client, and he has done very well for himself.

Amina places the handset into its cradle, smiles, lights a cigarette, and observes the man waiting at the door. She has not met him before but finds his apprehension familiar. Three others like him have passed through her office, each conveying the same sense of anxiety, each indebted to her but somehow indignant.

Ten days earlier, this man was named Gerhard Haber. Twelve years before that, he was SS-Einsatzgruppen colonel Gerhard Haber—a fact confided to Amina in a cable from Hanz Stössel, who asked if she would be willing to help another German family as she herself had once been helped. Since the fall of the Third Reich, the Habers had been on the run, living in considerable discomfort in the Paraná River valley in Argentina. The Nazi hunters had tracked them as far as South America.

“Completely false,” Stössel assured her concerning the war-crimes allegations against Haber, the details of which she did not want to hear. Too much knowledge, she had learned, is dangerous.

Sitting in her office pondering Haber, Amina is unsure exactly why she accepts these risks, first in helping Jews in Kamenz and now Nazis in America. Perhaps she does it for the thrill of knowing secrets of life and death. Whatever the reason, she has come to blame both the Jews and the Nazis for what happened to her and her family in Kamenz, and she convinces herself that given the opportunity to do it all over, she would permit the Gestapo to load the Schriebergs onto the train to Auschwitz, and the Nazi hunters to take the Habers to Israel. But she does not have it to do over.

Hanz Stössel had asked Amina to provide Haber and his family with false passports and new identities in exchange for another artwork of great value. She agreed, and Haber was there now to collect the passports and tender his payment. It was an easy thing for Amina. She told Albrecht Bosch what to print and he did exactly that, without question, in exchange for her indulgence of his expensive appetite for more sophisticated printing equipment and additions to his typeface collections.

Amina did not consult with Haber in the selection of names. Having never given birth to a child, she took great pleasure in bestowing new identities upon the people sent to her by Mr. Stössel.

She taps the ashes from her cigarette. “Come in and close the door,” she says to Haber.

Haber complies, and Amina retrieves a single passport from her drawer and examines it.

Gerry Hanson is a nice name,
she thinks.
Faithful at least to the first consonant and vowel of the original. And completely inconspicuous.

She hands it over to Haber for his approval. His eyes light up as he examines the authentic-looking exit stamp from Buenos Aires, which appears over the talons and tail feathers of a perfectly reproduced American eagle. The document is flawless.

“Danke,”
he says.

Amina raises her eyebrows.

“Sorry,” Haber corrects himself, practicing his new language. “Pardon me. I meant to say, ‘Thank you.’”

Amina gestures toward the guest chair and directs the table fan toward Haber—not out of concern for his comfort but to disperse the offensive scent of his perspiring body, which has suddenly overtaken the office. She retrieves four more passports from her desk and opens them. “Remind me again,” Amina says. “What are the names and ages of your wife and children?”

Haber tenses as if he has suddenly forgotten, then regains control of himself. “Hanna, age thirty-nine; Franz, age fifteen; Glenda, age thirteen; Claudia, ten.”

Amina examines each passport and slides it across the desk to Haber. “Hanna is now Helen,” she says. “Franz is Frank, Glenda is Gladys, and Claudia is Cathy.”

Haber appears disappointed. Amina frowns. “You don’t like the names?” she asks.

Haber shakes his head. “No, they are acceptable,” he says, not wanting to insult the woman who holds so much power over his fate. He examines the passport for his youngest daughter. “If I may,” he says timidly, “the birth date on Claudia’s—I mean, Cathy’s—is off by several years. Given her young age, it might attract attention.”

Amina takes the passport, examines it, scowls, and tosses it into her wastepaper basket. Haber becomes rigid, fearing that he has just ruined everything. But Amina does not vent her dissatisfaction upon him. She asks him for the correct birth date, scribbles it on a sheet of paper, and calls out to her secretary. The woman appears immediately with a steno pad. Amina is pleased by her efficiency in front of her guest.

“Alice,” she says, handing her the slip of paper, “please take this to Albrecht in the print shop and tell him he must reprint the Cathy Hanson document with this birth date. He’ll understand. Tell him I need a rush. It must be completed this afternoon.” Amina does not explain the nature of the project, and Alice does not ask. She leaves and Haber relaxes slightly.

“Thank you,” Haber says, carefully pronouncing the words.

“Welcome,” Amina replies.

For a brief moment, Amina feels sorry for Haber, but she quickly dismisses this sentimentality and reverts into the shell of Survivor Amina.

“You have something for me?” she asks impatiently, looking at the cylinder in Haber’s lap.

“Yes, of course,” Haber says.

He stands the cylinder on end, removes the cap, and extracts a long roll of dingy canvas, producing a small cloud of black soot. He apologizes for the mess as he unrolls the painting, which despite charred edges is in otherwise good condition. It depicts a funeral procession under gray winter skies—a coffin being carried through a snow-covered churchyard into the shattered ruins of a Gothic chapel. The name at the bottom right corner of the work is Caspar David Friedrich.

Amina touches the canvas and smiles. She has long admired the nineteenth-century Romantics, but most especially Friedrich, who himself lived in Dresden. The private girls’ school Amina attended in Kamenz, only a few blocks away from the boys’ school in which Helmut was killed, saw to it, by Nazi decree, that she learned first and most about Germany’s own great artists.

“Where did you get it?” she asks.

Haber hesitates. “It has been in my family,” he says vaguely. His evasiveness reminds Amina of the accusations against him, and she decides not to press for more information.

“They say Friedrich was influenced by Runge, but I don’t see it in his work,” Amina says. “Do you?”

“I trust you are satisfied?” Haber replies eagerly, either ignoring or not understanding the question.

“Yes,” Amina says, more coldly now and in the manner with which she dispatched the newsprint salesman. She exhales a cloud of cigarette smoke and places the passports back into her drawer. “I’m sure Hanz told you that I would require authentication. Someone from the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts will look at it this afternoon. Assuming there is no problem, you may return at four-thirty for your passports.”

Haber rises and forces a smile from his lips.

“Yes,” he says, bowing his head slightly. “I will be here.” He turns and walks out of the office. Amina closes the door behind him and phones the curator at the fine arts academy.

—

AMINA’S OFFICE DISAPPEARS
and the Courtroom reemerges into the foreground. Hanz Stössel is standing at the center. Luas, Elymas, and I sit in the chairs at the back.

“Do you still believe she is a victim?” Elymas asks me.

“Victim of what?” I ask.

Before Elymas can answer, the Courtroom disappears again and we are back in the office.

—

AMINA PROPS THE
canvas up on her credenza, leaning books against the corners to keep it erect. She steps back to imagine how it will look when framed. From this perspective, taking more time to observe the scene, the mourners in the painting appear to her as her own family must have appeared when carrying Helmut to his tomb beneath the twisted girders and broken concrete of the memorial her father had assembled for him from the debris of his school.

—

“VICTIM OF INJUSTICE,”
Elymas says. I can hear his voice but we are still in the office.

—

AMINA WIPES TEARS
from her eyes as the memory of that terrible day envelops her. She has been so consumed with the horror of Kamenz all these years that she has rarely thought of poor Helmut. She succumbs to the unanswerable guilt of such neglect, and of having named the press for her cousin, Bette, instead of her own brother, or her own mother or father.

—

“THE CREATURE WEEPS,”
Elymas whispers. “You feel her anguish, Brek Cuttler. But where is the compassion of her Creator? Can you feel that touching her soul? Does the throne express even the slightest concern? One tender thought or word? Where is justice? When will the scales be balanced?”