Authors: Leon Uris
“I am curious, Dr. Parmentier,” the judge said, “did any people resist entirely from hurting their fellow man?”
“Yes, resistance increased between husbands and wives, parents and children. Some would resist until their own death.”
The judge continued to question her. “Were there cases of say, a father or mother killing his own child?”
“Yes ... that is why ... I am sorry ... no one asked a question of me. ...”
“Please go on, Madame,” Gilray said.
“That is why Flensberg began searching for twins. He felt he could perform some sort of ultimate test on them. The girls from Belgium and Trieste were brought to Barrack III for his experiments and then Voss irradiated them. This upset Flensberg considerably. He threatened to protest to Berlin and was pacified, when Voss told him he would recommend to Himmler to give Flensberg a private clinic and Dr. Lotaki to do his surgery.”
“How utterly appalling,” Mr. Justice Gilray repeated.
“Let us digress for a moment,” Bannister said. “After you saw this experiment and read the reports, what transpired?”
“Flensberg assured me that once the initial surprise settled, I would become fascinated by the work. It was a rare opportunity for a psychiatrist to have human guinea pigs. Then, I was ordered to work for him.”
“And what did you answer to that?”
“I refused.”
“You refused?”
“Certainly I refused.”
“Well, exactly what was said?”
“Flensberg said that Barrack III was, after all, only filled with Jews. I said I knew it was filled with Jews. Then he said to me, ‘Don’t you realize that some people are different?’ ”
“What did you answer him?”
“I said, I have noticed the difference in some people, starting with you.’“
“Well, he must have taken you out and had you shot for that.”
“What?”
“Were you executed? Were you shot or sent to the gas chamber?”
“But of course not I am here in London. How could I have been shot?”
31
S
IR
R
OBERT
H
IGHSMITH WAS
clearly on the spot. During trial times he abandoned his place in Richmond Surrey for his flat on Codogan Square and its proximity to the West End and the Law Courts. Tonight he studied, hard.
No one could question but that Thomas Bannister had built a powerful case on circumstantial evidence and in catching Kelno on some questionable testimony. Yet, Kelno’s mistakes were largely that of a layman up against a mental giant, a master of legal gymnastics. Surely the jury, while recognizing Bannister’s genius, would more closely identify themselves with Adam Kelno.
At bedrock it all now hinged on Mark Tesslar, the single alleged eyewitness. Throughout all the years and all the trial, Sir Robert Highsmith refused to believe that Adam Kelno was guilty. Kelno’s career had been long and distinguished. Certainly, if he had the qualities of a monster, it would have shown up elsewhere along the line. Highsmith was convinced that this was the most terrible sort of vendetta. Two men, in their blind hatred of the other, unable to judge the truth.
He worked over his line of questioning absolutely determined to discredit Mark Tesslar.
Oh, he had moments of doubt, all right, but he was a British barrister, not judge or jury, and Adam Kelno was entitled to the best he had.
“I am going to win this case,” he vowed to himself.
“Where the devil is Terry?” Adam said angrily. He took another sharp drink of vodka. “I’ll bet he went to Mary. Did you phone?”
“There is no phone there.”
“He was in court today,” Adam said. “Why isn’t he here now?”
“Perhaps he’s at the college library studying late. He’s lost a lot of school time due to the trial.”
“I’m going to Mary’s,” Adam said.
“No,” Angela said. “I went after court. Mary hasn’t seen him in days. Adam, I know what is bothering you but these barristers are clever at twisting things. It’s their profession. But the jury knows the truth the same as your patients do. They’ve rallied to you. Please don’t drink, Terry will be around soon.”
“For God’s sake, woman, for once in my life let me get drunk without whining about it. Do I beat you? Do I do evil things?”
“You’ll get that nightmare.”
“Maybe not if I drink enough.”
“Adam, listen to me. You have to be strong in that courtroom tomorrow. You have to be strong when Tesslar is on the stand.”
“Hello, Angela. ... Hello, Doctor.”
Terry wobbled in and flopped on the sofa. “As you know,” he said, “I do not drink like the son of my father. I’ve always figured that Father Campbell could drink for the two of us.”
“Where the hell have you been!”
“Drinking.”
“Leave the room, Angela,” Adam commanded.
“No,” she answered.
“We won’t need a referee, Angela,” Terry slurred. “This is clearly a doctor and doctor situation.”
She backed away apprehensively but left the door ajar.
“What’s on your mind, Terry?”
“Things.”
“What things?”
Terry hung his head and his voice cracked and wavered to a point of almost being unrecognizable. “The shadow of doubt has descended upon me,” he mumbled. “Doctor ... I ... I don’t care what the jury decides. I want to hear from your own lips, between you and me ... did you do it?”
Adam stormed to his feet consumed with rage. He rose over the boy with both fists coming down on Terry’s neck. Terry doubled over making no attempt to defend himself.
“Bastard! I should have beaten you years ago!” His fists smashed down and Terry slid off the couch on all fours. Adam brought his foot up into the boy’s ribs. “I should have beaten you! That’s what my father did to me. He beat me like this ... like this!”
“Adam!” Angela screamed, throwing herself over Terry as a shield.
“Oh my God,” he cried in anguish, sinking to his knees. “Forgive me, Terry ... forgive me.”
The morning was fraught with rising tension as Highsmith and Bannister bandied about on some legal points. The night before Mark Tesslar arrived from Oxford there was a quiet dinner with Susanne Parmentier and Maria Viskova after which Abe, Shawcross, Ben, and Vanessa joined them for coffee.
“I know,” Mark Tesslar said, “what Highsmith intends to do. I will never be broken about the night of November tenth.”
“I don’t know if I can put into words how I feel about you,” Abe said. “I think you are the most noble and courageous man I have ever met.”
“Courage? No. It is just that I am beyond all pain,” Mark Tesslar answered.
For the first part of the morning, Chester Dicks took Susanne Parmentier through a relatively mild cross-examination until the afternoon recess.
Shawcross, Cady, his son and daughter, and Lady Sarah Wydman hit their drinks hard at the Three Tuns Tavern and played with their kidney pies as Josephson went to fetch Mark Tesslar from the hotel.
Adam Kelno was the first back into the courtroom. He was glassy-eyed, under sedation. He stared pleadingly at his wife and Terry in the first row of spectators as the room filled and then jammed to overflowing.
“Silence.”
Anthony Gilray seated himself and after the bows of the assemblage nodded to Thomas Bannister. At that moment Josephson rushed into the room to the solicitor’s table and whispered excitedly into Jacob Alexander’s ear. Alexander turned crimson, scribbled a note and handed it to Thomas Bannister. Thomas Bannister totally lost his composure, slumping into his chair. Brendon O’Conner leaned down from the junior’s table, snatched up the note, then wobbled to his feet.
“My Lord, our next witness was to have been Dr. Mark Tesslar. We have just been informed that Dr. Tesslar has dropped dead of a heart attack on the street outside his hotel. May we ask your Lordship for a recess for the day?”
“Tesslar ... dead ...”
“Yes, my Lord.”
32
T
HE FLAT IN
C
OLCHESTER
Mews was dimly lit when Vanessa opened the door for Lady Sarah. Abe looked up, half seeing her, half not. All of them were red-eyed from weeping.
“Abe, don’t take this on yourself,” Lady Sarah said. “He’s been very sick for a long time.”
“It’s not only Dr. Tesslar,” Vanessa said, “the embassy contacted Ben and Yossi this afternoon and ordered them to return to Israel immediately and report to their commands. It’s a mobilization.”
“Oh, dear Lord,” she said, standing above Abe and stroking his hair. “Abe, I know what you must feel but there are decisions that have to be made. Everyone is gathered at my flat.”
He nodded that he understood and arose and put on his jacket.
They were all there at Lady Sarah’s sharing communal grief. Thomas Bannister was there, and Brendon O’Conner was there, and Jacob Alexander, Lorraine and David Shawcross, Josephson, Sheila Lamb, and Geoffery, Pam Dodd, and Cecil Dodd. Oliver Lighthall was there also.
And there were four others. Pieter Van Damm and his family. The missing Menno Donker.
Abe embraced Van Damm and they held each other and patted each other for a moment.
“I flew in from Paris the moment I heard the news,” Pieter said, “I must go on the stand tomorrow.”
Abe went to the center of the room and faced them all. “Since I have been involved in this case,” he said hoarsely, “I have found myself the chief barker in a carnival of horrors. I’ve opened old wounds, brought back nightmares, and taken the lives of people into my hands who should have been left in peace. I told myself that their anonymity would be preserved. But here we have a man who is an international figure and it is impossible for the world not to know. You see, when the light went out in my eye a strange thing happened. Strangers in bars would try to pick fights with me. When people know you are a cripple their blood instincts rise to the surface and you are like a wounded animal on the desert with only a matter of time until the jackals and vultures devour you.”
“May I interrupt you,” Bannister said. “We all certainly know the problems of Mr. Van Damm’s future privacy. Fortunately British law takes these rare occasions into consideration. We have a procedure called In Camera. In Camera is testimony given in secret in unusual circumstances. We will appeal to have the courtroom cleared.”
“Who will be there?”
“The judge, the jury, his Lordship’s assistant, and the legal representation of both sides.”
“And you really think this can remain a secret? I don’t Pieter, you know how cruel the jokes will be. Do you honestly think you’ll ever be able to perform again before an audience with three thousand people staring between your legs? Well, the one thing I will not be responsible for is taking the music of Pieter Van Damm from the world.”
“The trouble with you, Cady,” Alexander snapped, “is that you’ve become enchanted with the idea of martyrdom. I think you are glorying in becoming the new Christ figure and want to immortalize yourself by getting lynched.”
“You’re very tired,” Abe answered, “you’ve been working too hard.”
“Gentlemen,” Bannister said, “we simply can’t afford the luxury of a quarrel among ourselves.”
“Here, here,” Shawcross said.
“Mr. Cady,” Bannister said, “you have won the universal respect and admiration of us all. You are a logical man and you must be made aware of the consequences of not permitting Mr. Van Damm to testify. Consider for a moment that Adam Kelno has won a large judgment. You would be responsible for the ruination of your closest friend, David Shawcross, and end his distinguished publishing career on a black note. But more important than Shawcross or yourself would be what Kelno’s victory would mean in the eyes of the world. It would be an insult to every Jew, those living, those courageous men and women who came forth in this case, and certainly it would be a most abominable affront to those who had been murdered by Hitler. You would be responsible for that too.”
There is another matter,” Oliver Lighthall said. “What about future medical ethics. How ghastly it would be for doctors in the future to point back at this case and use it as a justification for the maltreatment of patients.”
“So you see,” Bannister said, “your stand, no matter how virtuous, is filled with counter-responsibilities even more important.”
Abe studied them all, his worn-out little band of idealists. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he said in a voice that literally moaned with sorrow, “I should like to make a statement by quoting in effect the words of Thomas Bannister, Q.C., when he said that no one in their wildest imaginations would have believed Hitler’s Germany before it actually happened. And he said, if the civilized world knew what Hitler intended to do then they would have stopped him. Well, here we are in 1967, and the Arabs vow daily to finish Hitler’s work. Certainly the world will not stand for another chapter of this holocaust. There is a right and a wrong. It is right for people to want to survive. It is wrong to want to destroy them. It’s quite simple then. But alas, the kingdom of heaven is concerned with righteousness alone. The kingdoms of the earth run on oil. Well now, certainly the world should be appalled by what is happening in Biafra. The stink of genocide is everywhere. Certainly, after Hitler’s Germany, the world should step in and stop genocide in Biafra. However, that becomes impractical when one considers England’s investments in Nigeria conflict with France’s interests in Biafra. And after all, members of the jury, it is only black people killing other black people.
“We should like to think,” Abe said, “that Thomas Bannister was right, when he said more people, including the German people, should have risked punishment and death by refusing to obey orders. We should like to believe there would have been a protest and we ask why didn’t the Germans protest? Well today, young people march in the streets and protest Biafra and Vietnam and the principle of murdering their fellow man through the medium of war. And we say to them ... why are you protesting so much? Why don’t you go out there and kill like your father killed?
“Let us, for the moment, forget we are in jolly, comfortable London. We are in Jadwiga Concentration Camp. SS Colonel Dr. Thomas Bannister has summoned me into his office and says, ‘See here, you have got to agree to the destruction of Pieter Van Damm. Of course it will be done IN CAMERA. Barrack V was a secret place just like the courtroom will be. After all, we don’t do that sort of thing in public.’ And I quote to you again from Thomas Bannister, Q.C., when he said, ‘There comes a moment in the human experience when one’s life itself no longer makes sense when it is directed to the mutilation and murder of his fellow man.’ And I submit, members of the jury, I can bring no greater calamity or no more positive form of destruction upon this man than to allow him to take the witness stand. In closing, I say that I respectfully decline to murder Pieter Van Damm.”