Probing intermediate Seyfert galaxies by paβ spectroscopy

We present high-resolution spectroscopy at Paβ of a sample of nearby Seyfert galaxies. These objects have been selected because of their observed steep Balmer decrements. We demonstrate the usefulness of Paβ in untangling whether dust obscuration or radiative transfer effects cause the large observed Hα/Hβ ratio and find that either mechanism can be dominant. In the cases where dust obscuration is present we find that the dereddened line strengths, relative to the hard X-ray flux, coincide with those found in unreddened objects. We propose a model for the dust distribution which accounts naturally for the frequency of severely reddened AGNs and their amount of reddening.