It was 9:30 AM.
The ceremonial courtroom on the third floor was packed to the oak doors with two hundred people: federal prosecutors from the Department of Justice’s National Security Division, senior defense historians from the Smithsonian Institution, German diplomatic liaisons, and dozens of retired veterans from the Hendersonville American Legion post sitting in the front rows of the public gallery.
Advertisement
I sat at the primary complainant’s table beside Thomas and little Benjamin, wearing my pressed dark navy Sunday suit, an ivory shirt, and my father’s original 101st Airborne division pin resting on my lapel.
Beside our table sat Special Agent Marcus Vance, his hands resting flat upon the opened, lead-shielded Merker Cylinder, surrounded by three heavy steel evidence lockboxes containing forty-two thousand pages of decrypted European restitution records.
Across the aisle sat the defense table.
Sitting between two federal public defenders was Baron Friedrich von Hauff, his right arm immobilized in an orthopedic sling, his aristocratic posture completely shattered, his hands shackled to a leather belly chain that clinked against his knees.
Advertisement
Beside him sat Arthur Vance, dressed in the orange canvas jumpsuit of a federal pretrial detainee, his eyes fixed on the floorboards, weeping silently into his hands as his private dealership licenses were placed into public administrative receivership on the clerk's desk.
And sitting on the far end of the defense table, accompanied by a court-appointed legal aid attorney, was Margaret Whitfield.
In eight months of separation and judicial scrutiny, my former wife had lost every trace of her suburban pride.
Advertisement
She wore a plain gray cotton blouse and dark trousers from a local department store; her silver hair was unstyled, cut short; her manicured fingers twitched with a permanent, nervous tremor as she stared at the oak table, refusing to meet the eyes of the neighbors who had gathered to watch the collapse of her greed.
The heavy oak double doors behind the elevated bench clicked open.
"All rise!" the chief federal marshal barked, his voice echoing off the high plaster ceilings like a bronze bell. "The United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina is now in session. The Honorable Chief Judge Eleanor Davies presiding."
Advertisement
