The Trial of Fallen Angels (26 page)

They’re going to kill us! They’ve taken us out to the middle of nowhere to kill us!

“Listen,” I plead with him, “I’m sorry about what happened to your mother and godmother. I’ll do anything I can to make it better. You’ve got to understand, it was the government, not us, who put her in jail. We had no control—”

Ott slams the gun so hard into my side that I lose my breath.

The dirt road ends at a crumbling, one-story cinder-block building protruding from the ground like an ugly scab with windowless walls pocked with black streaks of mold and a leprosy of flaking white paint. It resembles the shell of an abandoned industrial building and looks out of place in the country. The cloying stench of manure and mushrooms make the air heavy and difficult to breathe.

We pull to a stop about twenty yards away. With the headlights illuminating the building, Tim leaves the engine running, pulls his gun, and goes inside. Ott waits nervously in the car with me until Tim reappears at the door and waves all-clear. He disappears inside again.

Ott climbs out and orders Sarah and me out with him. Pretending to fix my suit jacket, I stall for time.

This may be our only chance.

Ott is standing at the end of the open rear door, his head turned over his shoulder, looking at the building. The engine is running, but he could easily stop me if I tried to climb over the seat.

I have to get him away from the car.

I gently place Sarah into the footwell, where she’ll be safe. She stirs and looks up at me. Under the dome light on the ceiling, her eyes reflect back her love for me, as though she knows what I am about to do and she’s thanking me for risking my life for her. She’s trying to be so brave. I love her with all my heart. Tears fill my eyes.

I climb out of the car, shaking. Ott’s waiting for me but still looking at the building. He’s only a few inches taller than me, not nearly as intimidating as Tim. I decide what to do. I place my left hand on the door frame for balance and then, with all my strength, I thrust my knee up hard into his groin. He doesn’t see it coming and instantly collapses to the ground with a sucking groan.

It worked!

I slam the rear door closed, jump into the driver’s seat, and hit both locks with my elbow. As I reach around the steering wheel with my left hand to shift the gear selector into reverse, Tim comes running from the building at full speed, covering the ground so quickly that by the time I step on the accelerator, he’s already even with my door and he’s pointing his gun straight at me through the window. Time slows again, slicing the final moments of my life into small frames to be archived for the rest of eternity, decoupling memory from reality and reaching back to everything before—to the hands that bathed me when I was delivered from my mother’s womb and hugged me as a young child, to my husband, my family, my friends, my daughter . . . to the moments and the memories that had become Brek Abigail Cuttler. But just as Tim is about to fire, Ott lunges up at him from the ground, causing his gun to bark harmlessly into the air.

He saved my life!

Perspective accelerates to real time, to the blur of adrenaline and the desire to live. The car roars backward, toward home and safety, toward all we had created. But I’m racing backward so quickly and the path is so narrow that I lose control and we careen into a tree with a terrible jolt. Sarah starts wailing. I slam the gearshift into drive and stomp again on the accelerator, steering straight for Ott, who is on his knees aiming his gun at us. He fires four shots. The car slows and becomes less responsive, and I realize he’s shot out one of the front tires.

For a fraction of a second, I think of swerving to avoid hitting him, in gratitude for sparing my life earlier. But we are frozen in time, Ott Bowles and me, controlled by instinct and the will to survive. I accelerate straight for him. He rolls out of the way at the last second and the car plows into a manure pile.

Determined to win our freedom, I rap the selector into reverse again. But there’s a loud explosion and the rear-door window shatters into a hailstorm of glass pellets. Ott is sticking through the rear window, his gun pointing down at Sarah in the footwell, both arms outstretched and locked, police style.

“Don’t make me do this!” Ott yells at me. “Don’t make me do this!” His chest is heaving, every muscle tensed.

“Do it!” Tim shouts from the other side of the car, his eyes wide and crazed, intoxicated by the violence. “Do it now!”

Ott hesitates, and in that moment of indecision I shut off the engine and hand Ott the keys over my shoulder.

“Take them,” I say, my voice shaking, just above a whisper, desperate to calm him down. “Please. She’s just a baby.”

36

S
o, how long have you been a member of Die Elf?�� Ott Bowles asked the bearded, well-dressed, dark-haired man seated across from him at the small cocktail table. He asked this question while sipping a beer and following a baseball game playing on the television over the bar.

“I’m not exactly a member,” the man said, exhaling smoke from a cigarette, uninterested in the game. “Die Elf supports what I’m doing, and I support what they’re doing.”

It was late afternoon on a bright summer day, and the bar was deserted. Ott was not yet of legal age to consume alcohol, but Trudy, the owner of the bar built at the foot of a mountain between Huntingdon and Altoona, served her customers without regard to age. She was a large woman with flaming red hair, and this afternoon she sat behind the bar, watching the game and waiting for customers. The man sitting across from Ott was plainly of legal age, but he sipped club soda through a straw.

“Yes!” Ott said, clenching his fist as a runner crossed home plate. “Bottom of the ninth, and the Pirates are coming back.” He swallowed a gulp of beer and belched in the manner that he believed men interested in sports belched.

“Well, you’ve got to admit, Sam,” Ott said, “there’s some guys in Die Elf who are wound pretty tight. I’m more German than any of them, and I’m proud as hell of my heritage, but I think they carry the racist stuff too far. I’ve studied World War Two. That’s what got Germany into trouble. If Hitler had been less extreme and kept his eye on the ball, the outcome of the war probably would have been totally different. Germany might be the big superpower today instead of the United States.”

“It’s possible,” Sam said. “But it was also Hitler’s eccentricities and excesses that got him as far as he did. Who knows, maybe he wasn’t excessive enough. One person’s extreme ideas are another person’s revelation and call to revolution. Anyway, the members of Die Elf have been good to me. I owe them.”

Ott picked up his beer and turned back to the baseball game. He wished he hadn’t brought up the subject. He enjoyed the camaraderie of Die Elf well enough, and the paramilitary training and the paintball war games they played—and certainly the way everybody treated him like royalty because of his family’s past. But their rabid hatred of Jews and blacks just made them look like a bunch of dead-enders and lunatics. Sam’s defense of them meant he was probably just as fanatical, which was disappointing because Ott was searching for somebody who saw things the way he did and thought maybe Sam, who had always seemed more reasonable than the others, could be the one. “Where are you from?” Ott asked, changing the subject.

“New York.”

“I mean your family. What kind of name is Samar Mansour . . . French?”

“No, Palestinian actually,” Sam said.

Ott examined Sam more closely. He could see the Arab face now, the thick black beard and dark skin. But where did those blue eyes come from? Ott had never known an Arab, and he couldn’t imagine how the members of Die Elf would want to do anything to help one. They hated anybody who wasn’t white and Christian. Maybe it was because Sam seemed more European than Middle Eastern with his aloof attitude, articulate speech, and pressed blue cotton dress shirts and black pants—more like a Londoner or a Parisian, or perhaps even a Berliner. “When did your family come here?” Ott asked, looking back up at the baseball game.

“My father came over when he was about your age. He was one of the Palestinian refugees . . . his parents were killed by the Jews during the war in 1948.”

Ott glanced at him, then back at the game.

“Most Palestinians stayed in the Middle East,” Sam continued, “but after the war my father got a job carrying equipment for an American archaeologist on a dig in Jerusalem, a professor from over at Juniata College, actually. Mijares was his name. In any case, he was very wealthy, and very generous, and he liked my father. I guess he thought my dad was pretty smart, because he offered to send him to college here, all expenses paid. My father accepted. He attended Columbia University, married an American woman, and stayed. I was born in New York.”

Sam waved for Trudy to bring them another round of drinks.

“Be right there, honey,” she said, pulling two glasses from under the bar, grateful for something to do.

“Just another refugee story,” Sam said to Ott. “Not very different from your family’s.”

Ott was thinking the same thing. He finished his beer, accidentally dribbling a little onto his T-shirt. “You know our story?” he asked, reaching across to another table for a bar napkin.

“I know all about your family,” Sam said. “Brian Shelly told me a little, and I’ve done some research on the Rabuns. People don’t realize it, but Germans and Arabs have a lot in common.
Das ist warum ich beginnen wollte, Sie zu kennen
.”

A look of surprise flashed across Ott’s face.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Wenig.”

“Wie viele Male sind Sie nach Deutschland gewesen?”

“Ich habe ein ungefähr Jahr dort verbracht.”

They stopped speaking in German when Trudy brought the drinks to the table.

“You boys want anything from the grill?” she asked. “I can fix you some burgers.”

Sam shook his head. “You want anything, Ott?” he asked. “I’m buying.”

“No, thanks,” Ott said.

“You boys just let me know,” Trudy replied, a little disappointed. She returned to her stool behind the bar to watch the game.

“Too bad about Brian, wasn’t it?” Ott said.

“Yeah,” Sam replied. “He was pretty young to have a heart attack. I guess you never know.”

“The funeral was tough,” Ott said. “Tim and his mom took it hard. On top of everything else, I guess Brian had all their property mortgaged to the hilt and had stopped paying his life insurance. Tim said they had to sell their house and their mushroom farm to pay off their debts. He’s been staying with me for a while.”

“He’s lucky to have you as a friend,” Sam replied. “It must have been hard on you too when you lost your godmother. She was a great woman. I admired her newspaper writing a lot. It wasn’t that long ago, was it?”

Ott nodded uncomfortably, losing eye contact. “About a year now, I guess—less than a year after she got out of jail. Prison killed her.” He looked out the window painfully, embarrassed for showing his emotions. “So what exactly are you doing for Die Elf?” he asked, changing the subject back again.

“I’m making a documentary on the Holocaust. I’m going to show that it was a hoax created by the Allies and the Jews.”

The Pirates scored another run on the television. Sam looked up, but suddenly Ott was less interested in the game. “So
you’re
the one?” Ott said. “Brian told me he knew somebody making a documentary about the Holocaust, but he wouldn’t tell me anything more than that.”

Sam turned from the television back to Ott, grinning like the player who had just scored the run. “It was a secret for a while,” he said. “Only a few guys knew about it. Brian, Harlan Hurley. Harlan’s been a big help in funding it.”

“Really, the guy who works for the school district?” Ott said. “He always seems pretty quiet.”

“The quiet ones often do the most,” Sam said. “He’s been taking money from the—” Sam caught himself. “Let’s just say that he’s been using some creative financing to help fund my work. It takes a lot of money to do a documentary right—equipment, camera crews, travel expenses, studio time. I just finished the editing, actually. It came out great. The more I learned about your background, the more I thought you might be interested in the project. That’s why I wanted to meet with you today.”

“Can I see it?” Ott asked eagerly.

“Sure, soon,” Sam replied.

“Where did you learn to do documentaries?” Ott asked. “Are you a filmmaker?”

“No,” Sam said. “This is my first documentary, but I learn fast and I had an experienced crew. I was finishing my Ph.D. in history at Juniata—as a recipient of the Mijares Fellowship actually. The documentary was supposed to be my dissertation, but the head of the history department is a Jew and, for obvious reasons, he wasn’t too happy with my subject or my conclusions. He gave me the option of picking a new topic or leaving school without a degree. I left. Harlan and some of the others heard about it, and they’ve been funding the project for a few years now.”

“Wow,” Ott said. “I give you credit for taking on one of the most controversial issues in the world. But it’s going to be tough convincing people the Holocaust was a hoax. Don’t get me wrong . . . nothing would make me happier than finding out it was a lie, but I’ve seen the pictures and read the histories. I’ve been to some of the camps too. My family built the incinerators. There’s a lot of evidence out there to disprove.”

Sam frowned. “But you don’t really believe your family, or your countrymen, would murder millions of their own people in cold blood, whether they were Jews or not, do you? It doesn’t make any sense. The Germans weren’t barbarians, they were Europeans.” He paused and carefully folded his cocktail napkin into a triangle, then again into a smaller triangle. “I’m a student of history, Ott,” he said. “As a student of history, I’ve learned that the men who leave a mark on this world are the ones who turn black into white and white into black. It’s along the border between opposites that we find the energy to create and to destroy.” He suddenly crumpled the napkin as if illustrating his point. “Microscopic atoms split into world-changing bombs. Tectonic plates shift and new continents are formed. Politicians make peace into war and war into peace. Religions turn sinners into saints and saints into sinners. Have no doubt: Whether the actions of men are good or evil depends upon which quality we choose to see.”

The beer was hitting Ott now, and he was beginning to enjoy himself. He felt a warm tingling in his lips and forehead. Sam didn’t seem to be the extremist he had feared after all. He was actually quite rational, a man who used logic and reason.

Ott enjoyed philosophical discussions and the challenge of talking to educated people. He believed he could do well in college if given a chance. He was even thinking about attending, maybe a university in Germany. He hadn’t done much of anything in the year since he graduated from high school, except hang out at the mansion in Buffalo or at Die Elf’s training compound in the woods near Huntingdon. Most of the members of Die Elf were just disgruntled local men, unemployed or underemployed. They drove pickup trucks, drank beer, loved guns, and hated Jews and blacks but couldn’t tell you why. But they had taken Ott into their confidence and shown him how to use Die Elf’s sophisticated satellite telephones, e-mail encryption technology, and remote computer servers that ensured secure communication with other white supremacist organizations around the country. Maybe, Ott thought, he would study computers in college. He liked the precision and unambiguousness of math; and computers, as nonjudgmental machines, gave him the unconditional acceptance he craved.

“Think about all the great men,” Sam continued. “Einstein demonstrated that mass is energy and energy, mass—now that’s turning black into white and white into black. Galileo demonstrated that the earth orbits the sun. Columbus demonstrated that the earth is round. In the entire history of the human race, of all the billions of people who have ever walked the planet, we remember only a few thousand at most. Why? Because these are the men who demolished prevailing beliefs and formed new worlds using contradiction as their chisel. That’s why they’re remembered . . . and that’s how I want to be remembered.”

“Pretty interesting,” Ott replied. “I guess I agree with you, but that still doesn’t prove the Holocaust was a hoax.”

Sam glanced up at the television. “Two outs,” he said, sipping his beer. Then he placed the glass on the table and looked directly into Ott’s eyes. “Prove? What is proof? And who’s asking?” He smiled. “I know you, Ott Bowles. I know what you want. I’m just like you.”

Ott was both puzzled and intrigued.

“I’m not a racist or a religious zealot, and neither are you,” Sam continued. “We’re practical men with a practical problem. The simple reality is this: The reputations of the German people and your family were ruined, and the homes of the Palestinian people and my family were taken at almost the exact same time. Other than the timing, you might think that these two events are entirely unrelated. They happened to different groups of people in different parts of the world. But there is a single common denominator.”

“Obviously the Jews,” Ott responded wearily. He began to worry again that Sam was like the others. “But I thought we just agreed that we’re not racists.”

“We’re not,” Sam said. “We’re rational thinkers exploring whether our problems have similar causes and effects. Let’s take Israel for a minute. Now, there was no Israel between the year 70 and 1948—three years after the Allies won World War Two. But before the year 70, Israel existed. What was the basis for its existence back then?”

“I don’t know,” Ott said. “I’m not up on Israeli history.”

“It’s simple,” Sam said. “The Jews told the world a fantastic, unbelievable story that, for a while, everybody accepted. They said that God personally promised Palestine to Abraham. No witnesses, no writing, no deed or anything. Just one man’s claim that God came down from heaven and said the land was his and his descendants’ because they were favored and chosen by God for special protection against their enemies. Amazingly, this story was compelling enough for the Jews to hold on to that land for about three thousand years. But then the Romans came along and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding! God didn’t say anything to us about you living here!’ So they booted the Jews out.”

“I guess so,” Ott said, turning back to the baseball game.

“It’s true,” Sam continued. “And for the next two thousand years, there was no Israel at all. Didn’t exist. But then, in 1948, the Jews got the land back. How? What happened?”

Ott was no longer paying attention and didn’t hear the question.

“Come on, Ott,” Sam said, “how did the Jews get Israel back? What happened in 1948 to change two thousand years of history?”