The Chrysalis

by Heather Terrell

  “Really?” She heard the unease in his voice, sensed it in the slackness of his limbs, and felt it echo in the corner of her own mind.

  “Really,” she insisted, and initiated a more intimate embrace, involving their whole bodies. Afterward, delicious, protected sleep.

  “Mara.” Somewhere she heard a whisper. “Mara, honey, I don’t want to wake you, but I need to leave. I don’t want to, but I have to.”

  She knew he had to leave. He was scheduled to meet with friends she had never met to travel to the bachelor party of his last bachelor friend. From there, he had a business trip to Europe, where he’d be for weeks. She feigned sleep, as a way to savor the last few moments.

  “Mara, honey, I don’t want to leave without saying goodbye.”

  She opened her eyes to the morning light and stretched to the very tips of her toes. “I know. I don’t want you to leave with saying goodbye either.” She shut her eyes again.

  He kissed her closed eyelids. “It’s okay, baby. I’ll call you every day.”

  She unraveled herself from the bedcovers and appropriated his T-shirt, wrapping herself into it to cover her nakedness. They padded to the door.

  Stooping down as if to kiss her, he instead rested his head in the curve of her neck.

  “I’ll be thinking about you. Missing you.” He encircled her. She breathed him in. His musky morning aroma was so different from his crisp day smell, the scent of pressed Thomas Pink shirts and money.

  “Me, too. Travel safely.”

  After he left and she secured the door behind him, Mara put her back against it for a moment, eyes closed. Then she buried herself deep under the tangle of sheets he had left behind, hoping to recapture some of the gift of sleep he granted.

  With Michael gone, Mara allowed her day life to take over. She longed for him at night, but she felt his presence in her work, and her hours were spent endeavoring to win him his victory and secure her advancement. She formulated lists of information that she needed to procure from within and without, she crafted a roster of witnesses and testimony, and she spent day after day foraging and scavenging in Lillian’s sacred library of provenance, amassing defensive and offensive weaponry.

  If she were diligent, and very, very lucky, she might be able to build an impenetrable barricade to Hilda Baum’s attack on the painting. Mara knew firsthand that Hilda’s personal story had a strong emotional appeal, and she did not want the judge to hear too much of it. So she outlined a summary judgment motion to make at the close of discovery, to prove to the judge that the undisputed facts warranted final judgment for Beazley’s, thereby obviating the need for a public, damaging trial. She hoped her motion would become a blockade, forcing the judge to one conclusion only, no matter how unpalatable—that Hilda Baum should lose her war for The Chrysalis.

  Mara made the first move and served a series of document requests and interrogatories to Hilda Baum’s lawyer. She hoped to gather additional admissions that would help her cause. Hilda Baum produced the expected papers, not the roomfuls of discovery Mara handled in her typical cases but a few critical boxes. Alone, they told a tragic, compelling tale, but Mara knew how to combine them with Beazley’s documents to cast a less sympathetic light on her story.

  A date was set for Hilda’s deposition. Mara knew that the war could be won or lost on Hilda’s tale of The Chrysalis’s lineage and her recitation of her long quest. But in the days before the deposition, a calm descended on her. Unlike any deposition she had taken before, there was little more she could do to prepare; everything rested on her performance at the deposition and before the judge at the summary judgment argument. She would lurk like a panther as Hilda’s story unfolded and, in the subtlest way, pounce to elicit the testimony she needed to defuse the compassion.

  The day finally arrived, and when Mara awakened, her heart was racing. Her hands and mind, however, were steady, like a soldier ready for battle. She selected a light gray suit, with an ice-blue sweater underneath. The sweater highlighted her eyes and made her look younger and, she hoped, deceptively vulnerable. She wore only the simplest of jewelry and makeup and tied her hair in a barrette, low at the back. She wished Michael could see her.

  Mara arrived in the conference room first and took her time settling in, arranging notepads of questions, manila folders of documents, and a paralegal at her side. Then she sat and waited for her opponent.

  A grandmotherly woman toddled in on the arm of a stooped, elderly gentleman. She was dressed in an A-line plaid skirt with a sweater set and a tiny pearl cross. A near halo of fluffy white curls encircled her face. Her eyes sparkled as she stretched out her hand to Mara. Her English was perfect, but the cadence different, a staccato punctuated with crescendos. The accent was European and somewhat British, but not otherwise placeable.

  Pleasantries completed, Hilda Baum and her lawyer took their seats, and Mara signaled for the court reporter and videographer to begin. The battle commenced: En garde.

  “Ms. Baum, isn’t it true that your father, Erich Baum, often used Henri Rochlitz of Nice, France, as his agent to sell paintings on his behalf?”

  “Yes, Ms. Coyne, that is true.”

  “And, Ms. Baum, isn’t it correct that, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, your father actually sent several paintings to Henri Rochlitz to sell on his behalf?” Mara spread out exhibits, bills of sale procured by Lillian from the bowels of Beazley’s, in front of Hilda Baum. “These paintings?”

  The older woman reached for the documents with a withered, sunspotted hand and perused them with care. “Yes, Ms. Coyne, that is correct.”

  For a moment, Mara felt buoyant. She was poised to prove her argument that Erich Baum had sent The Chrysalis to Nice not for safe storage with a family member but to his longtime agent, Henri Rochlitz, with authorization to sell it to Albert Boettcher, from whom Beazley’s had procured it. But before Mara could ask her next question, Hilda Baum parried, doing her best to protect the detail that Mara sought. “But, of course, the letter my father sent me stated simply that he had forwarded certain paintings, including The Chrysalis, on to Nice. It does not say anything about sending the paintings to Henri Rochlitz for him to sell. That is how I know they were sent to our family in Nice—my father’s aunt—for safe storage. In fact, he told me during Christmas of 1939 that if the war situation worsened, this is what he would do.” She paused for effect. “Surely you’ve seen the letter? We produced it as part of our document production.” Indeed, Mara had seen the handwritten note, more like a scribble, from Erich Baum to his daughter stating that he had sent certain paintings, including The Chrysalis, to Nice. She had spent long hours pondering it, as the note was a problem with which she’d have to contend. But Mara hoped that the exhibits helped establish that it was Erich Baum’s pattern to send his paintings to Nice for sale, not storage.

  Each time Mara tried to question the nature of The Chrysalis’s journey to Nice and beyond, Hilda cut Mara with the sharp edge of her own story and that of her parents. She reminded Mara over and over that The Chrysalis, the devotional portion of her father’s renowned art collection where he honored his family’s conversion to Catholicism, was a painting for which the Nazis had killed her parents.

  As the two women jousted over the topic of The Chrysalis’s significance to Erich Baum, Hilda turned to her lawyer, as if she’d just remembered something. “Bert, could you hand me that envelope I found last night?”

  Her gnarled knuckles scraping over the tabletop, Hilda passed a large white envelope to Mara. “What is this, Ms. Baum?” Mara asked.

  “Oh, I think the contents explain themselves. Why don’t you open it?” Hilda answered, with the tiniest grin on her face.

  Mara sliced open the heavily taped envelope, and curling yellowed photographs spilled out from it. She looked at them. In one, a delicate woman, overwhelmed by an elaborate coiffure, perched imperiously on a rococo side chair. Mara brought the picture closer, noticing the hesitancy of the smile on the woman’s deeply colored
lips and the direction of her gaze. The woman’s eyes were fixed on the round-faced, dapper man at her side, who sported an infectious grin and a pomaded helmet of black hair. A young girl, blond ringlets escaping from a bow, stood between them, linking her hands with theirs. They formed this little chain for the camera again and again in the other photos, captured at Christmas holidays, birthdays, Easters. The innocence and immediacy of the young family transfixed Mara, and she could almost feel her fingers interlaced with theirs. This was precisely the human element that she had hoped to keep out of the case.

  As she pored back over the photographs, trying to formulate questions that might defuse their emotional resonance, Mara saw that the surfaces of walls, tables, and mantels surrounding the young Baum family overflowed with paintings, sculptures, silver, and woven tapestries. When she looked closely at certain pictures, she saw The Chrysalis. The artwork started to morph into instruments of destruction. A silver chalice became the butt of a rifle. A striking sculpture turned into a blade. A richly embroidered tapestry formed a noose. A priceless painting depicted a gas chamber. The Baums’ smiles melted into screams, and the little girl between them cried.

  Mara looked over at Hilda Baum’s beaming face; the photographs had the desired effect. “These are pictures of your family,” Mara pronounced somewhat hesitantly.

  “Yes. With The Chrysalis, of course.”

  Mara felt blood seeping from her wounds. She needed to turn everyone’s attention away from these sympathetic pictures as quickly as she could. If she didn’t, she risked losing not only the case but also herself to the Baums.

  It took all of her strength to try again with a different line of questioning. Mara needed to lance Hilda with DeClerck, make plain her failure to search, and then stab her with the German Art Restitution Commission release. “Ms. Baum, in late 1945 and 1946, the year following the war, what efforts did you make to find The Chrysalis?”

  Hilda sampled her tea and then answered deliberately. “The year following the war. Let me see if I can remember, Ms. Coyne. I think I spent much of that time trying to find my parents. I confess my search for The Chrysalis really didn’t start until I learned that the Nazis had killed them.”

  Again, Mara tried to steer away from the Baums’ personal story. “Ms. Baum, I would request that you respond only to my inquiry about The Chrysalis.”

  “Can you please repeat the question?”

  “In late 1945 and 1946, did you look for The Chrysalis?”

  “No, Ms. Coyne, as I mentioned already, I focused on finding my parents. Other than that, I really have no memories of the last year of the war. It is as if on the first day of peace, I awoke. I went directly to the Red Cross, where there were lists of people who had survived the concentration camps. My parents’ names were not on those lists. I went roaming throughout Italy, where I was living at the time, throughout any part of Europe I was permitted to enter, trying to find them—”

  Mara broke in, “Ms. Baum, please just answer the question I asked. About The Chrysalis.”

  Hilda’s lawyer struggled to stand up. “Ms. Coyne, I object to your last statement. You opened the door with your question, and my client should be permitted to answer, in her own words and in her own way.”

  Mara winced. He was right. Any attempt Mara might make to take Hilda’s obfuscation up with the judge on motion or in a middeposition phone call would backfire: Mara would seem heartless and unreasonable. So she gestured for Hilda to continue.

  “I spent late 1945 and 1946 combing through refugee camps, interviewing anyone I could find who might have crossed my parents’ path as they made their way across Europe from the Netherlands. My parents thought they had been granted safe passage to Italy to see my husband, Giuseppe, and me where his connections could offer some kind of protection for them. They had to travel via Berlin, of course: All international trains had to pass through Berlin at that time.” Tears formed in Hilda’s eyes as she recalled her parents’ innocent trust of the Nazi officers who’d showed up at their home early one morning with visas and train tickets, despite the fact that their own daughter had tried for months to procure those same tickets and visas without success.

  “They so wanted to believe, because they needed to get out of the occupied Netherlands after they’d been classified as Jews. Father’s grandfather, you see—an ardent Catholic, by all accounts—had been born Jewish but converted as a child. Somehow the Nazis managed to hunt down any weak link in someone’s lineage. I continued to receive my father’s letters, which arrived more and more sporadically due to the vagaries of the diplomatic pouch. While they were unfailingly pleasant, I knew that my parents’ lives must have become a living hell—”

  “Ms. Baum, you are straying very far from my questions. Let’s refocus on your attempts to find The Chrysalis.”

  “Ms. Coyne, I am an old woman. You’re asking me to recount events that happened over sixty years ago. To properly remember them, I must review them in order.” Mara surrendered to Hilda’s trump card. No judge in the world would let Mara cut off Hilda’s litany if she claimed it was necessary for her full recollection of the facts.

  “From Italy, my husband and I did what we could to protect them. We were able to get my parents a letter, signed by the reichskommissar of the Netherlands, Seyss-Inquart. I know what it said by heart:

  No security or police measures of any kind are to be carried out against the Jew and Dutch citizens, Erich and Cornelia Baum, who reside in Amsterdam….

  We thought they’d be safe, that the letter would protect them. But Father’s passion, his art, was too much of a temptation for the Nazis. I suspected they would want Father’s art collection. Not the Impressionists so much. The Nazis’ hatred for ‘degenerate’ modern art was well known, although they could not ignore its value in trade. No, I surmised the Nazis would covet those old masters and German portraits that my father had collected early on. The Nazis stalked my parents for those paintings, harassed them for them, deprived them of what few liberties they had as so-called Jews just to get to them. They threatened to arrest them if they left the house without the stars my parents often refused to wear, unless they handed the paintings over. The Nazis tried everything short of outright hauling them off to concentration camps. But the Seyss-Inquart letter put a stop to the harassment, and being good, obedient Nazis, they wouldn’t dare defy Seyss-Inquart’s letter. Not in the Netherlands, at least. So they staged the trip to Italy.”

  Liquid warmth spread across Mara’s lip. She tasted blood. She’d been biting her lip throughout Hilda’s testimony.

  “In 1946, in refugee camps, I finally met some people who knew what had happened to my parents in the Berlin train station and beyond: a sweeper from the Berlin station and two concentration camp survivors, Jewish acquaintances of my parents from Amsterdam. When my parents’ train pulled into Berlin, a Nazi officer presented them with a document, in which Father would agree to sign away his art collection and tell them its whereabouts. Father refused to sign, waving the Seyss-Inquart letter in front of them. But with my parents out of the Netherlands and actually before them with the loot nearly in hand, the letter did not deter the Nazis. They disengaged my parents’ car from the train and then dragged my parents into Nazi headquarters in Berlin for interrogation. They tortured my parents. Father first, to get him to sign away the art collection. When he resisted, screaming that he would not, they whipped Mother in front of him. Father remained stalwart.

  “So, they put my parents on another train, this one going toward Munich, to Dachau. When their torments yielded nothing, the Nazis shot my father to death in the public square in the center of the prison, in front of all the prisoners. After this, Mother had no value alive, so they killed her at Dachau. With the death of my parents, the Nazis were free to confiscate the rest of the art collection. Including The Chrysalis.”

  Silence. The cross-examination Mara had at the ready could not be asked. In the stillness that followed, Mara could almost hear her grandm
other gasp.

  Hilda stared at Mara, her eyes triumphant. “So, to answer your question, Ms. Coyne, I began my search for The Chrysalis after I learned all of this.”

  fourteen

  AMSTERDAM, 1942

  “WELCOME HOME, MR. BAUM, SIR.”

  Willem opens the door for Erich as he crosses the threshold to his home and then helps him off with his overcoat. His once elegant cashmere coat is now emblazoned with the garish yellow of a crude star, cut as if by the dull-edged scissors of a kindergarten child. Though labeled a Jew by the Nazis, Erich cannot quite think of himself as one.

  As the coat lifts off his shoulders, Erich feels the weight of the star lift off him as well, allowing his stature to elevate and his shoulders to square. For this one fleeting moment, he can almost bear the day’s humiliation of calling on old colleagues in hopes that they’ll ignore Reichskommissar Seyss-Inquart’s rules prohibiting Jews from working in the financial industry, a necessary exercise now that an Aryan “trustee” has taken over his insurance business, leaving him with no livelihood. He abides this shame every day during his long walk to and from the business district, as Jews are no longer permitted to ride in cars or on public transport.

  “Thank you, Willem.” Erich marvels that the servants have stayed, though he reminds himself that his house has been their home as long as it’s been his, and he supposes they have nowhere else to go. No one is hiring help these days, not even the Nazis or their Dutch henchmen, and he and Cornelia can still provide the servants with meals and shelter, though cash is now scarce since the reichskommissar forbids Jews from withdrawing money even from their own bank accounts. Yet he feels like a fraud as the servants rush to minister to him. Outside these doors, he is the abomination unworthy of subservience, and they are pure Aryan gold.

  “Erich, is that you?” He hears his wife’s voice ring out from the parlor.