“Same goes for me,” Gastly said. “My people are behind you on this one. You won’t have to watch your back. We’ll protect you there. Just do it firmly and quickly. Don’t get cold feet halfway through.”
“Well, I hope God and history will forgive me, but I’ll do what has to be done,” Quaid said softly. “May Catherine forgive me, too. I’ll speak with the attorney general first thing tomorrow morning. She won’t like doing this, but I’m not giving her any choice.”
Attorney General Maryellen McQueeney, “the Queen” to friends and enemies, had an uncomfortable feeling when she was summoned to the White House for an early morning meeting with the president the next day. He’d been right. She didn’t like what she heard from him. She asked for more time, a week or so, to study options.
“You have no options, Queen,” Quaid told her. “This decision has been made. You are going to implement it. There may be a high price to pay for what we’re about to do. I’m willing to pay that price. You won’t have to. This is my decision, not yours, and people are going to know that. Your job is to do your job. I suggest you fly to Boston and tell your people what they are going to do. I want this kept quiet until you have all those people in custody, then I’ll make the announcement myself.”
The attorney general nodded, looking grim.
“One other thing. I don’t want some Jewish Assistant US Attorney in Boston deciding his loyalty is to other Jews and not to the United States. This will work if we do it quickly, with surprise, with no advance warnings. I don’t want this to turn into a months-long nationwide manhunt. I want it over with, quickly and cleanly. Be careful who is on the case and who is off the case. Keep it subtle, but let’s not be stupid on this one.”
“Mr. President,” the attorney general said. “I most respectfully disagree with what you are asking me to do. Please, let’s give this a bit more thought before we start down a road without knowing where it will end. Please, sir, don’t ask me to do this thing.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything,” Quaid huffed. “I am telling you to do this. I am ordering you to do this. And you will do this. You will not resign, at least not until this is over. You will do this. I will have your support and your loyalty. Do you understand me?”
McQueeney stepped back. She had never seen the president like this. She had been a judge on the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California and had been drawn to Lawrence Quaid because of his unflinching ethical record. She had felt like a colleague to Quaid—until now.
“Yes, sir,” McQueeney said with a faux salute. “I’ll follow orders. I won’t publicly disagree with you. I won’t embarrass you. And when the job is done, you can look for a new attorney general.”
She walked to the door, reached for the doorknob, then turned to face Quaid.
“Mr. President, I’m not the first good soldier to agree to follow orders to round up Jews. I hope history is more kind to you and me than it was the last time this happened. Good day, sir.”
McQueeney was on a plane and in her Boston office that afternoon. It was unusual for the attorney general to visit a field office. If the Queen wanted to speak with her subordinates, they were usually summoned to Washington. She ordered the staff assembled and wasted no time getting to the point.
“This decision regarding the Jewish refugees comes direct from the president,” she told the assembled attorneys. “I won’t say I played no role in the decision, but it was apparent to me that the president’s mind is made up. Some of you are not going to be pleased by this decision, but I am sure you will each do your jobs. Or if you feel you can’t do your job, then resign effective immediately. There are no other options, no other choices. There will be no free passes on this one.”
Still, it was not as simple as that. Arresting Israeli soldiers, or even all the Israeli civilians from the ships, was something she could live with. More difficult was the decision about who should be arrested from the thousands of local families who sheltered these people.
McQueeney did not want the US citizens arrested, she told the Boston staff. Her preference was to issue summonses ordering these people to appear in court at a later time, a time she hoped could be postponed enough so some new crisis would draw the public’s attention and she would not have to prosecute generally law-abiding citizens, prosperous citizens, for doing what she felt in her heart she would have done had she been in their shoes.
She decided to modify the president’s order. Only one adult member of every household that harbored refugees would be taken into custody. Each household would decide who would take responsibility and who would stay behind.
“And no children, no teenagers,” she told her subordinates. “Not even if they want to go, not even if they ask to go.”
CHAPTER 15
Judy Katz broke her widowed grandmother’s heart every day, torturing the woman who raised her after her parents were killed in an automobile accident when she was six years old. Judy barely remembered her parents and knew little of their history, how they’d met, why they’d married. She retained no memory of her life with them. Her grandmother rarely spoke about her dead son and daughter-in-law, and never spoke about her own husband, who Judy only knew had died long before she’d been born. Judy had no family besides her grandmother—no cousins, no uncles or aunts.
They’d lived in an old woman’s apartment in which fresh air was prohibited and the sofa was covered in plastic except when company was present, in the same Queens, New York, neighborhood where her grandmother moved on her arrival in the US after the war.
The only hint about her family history came once when Judy was watching Schindler’s List on HBO, pretending to be able to sip Manischewitz concord wine, a slightly alcoholic grape juice. Halfway through the movie, with Judy in tears, her grandmother turned toward her and, in a voice as casual as if she were discussing chicken breasts going on sale tomorrow, said, “I was there, you know.”
A stunned Judy Katz listened to her grandmother describe how she had lived in Warsaw, Poland. When the Germans invaded, all the Jews were imprisoned behind walls, the Warsaw Ghetto. The greater shocker was that Judy’s father had been born there, in the midst of the ghetto. Her grandfather, who she learned for the first time had been a tailor, smuggled his wife and newborn son out through sewer lines that led under the walls. Once his wife and son were outside the ghetto, the tailor had returned—returned to fight the Nazis. They killed him. No other family member survived the war.
Her grandmother never mentioned that history again, waving her hands and poofing at “history-schmistory.” It never left Judy, though. I am a child of death and destruction, the offspring of tyranny and war, she thought.
Her grandmother was less lyrical. She was devastated that her granddaughter was thirty-one years old and not married, not even seeing anybody “serious.”
But that wasn’t the biggest disappointment. After putting her granddaughter through Amherst College, then Boston College Law School—“A Catholic law school,” her grandmother would say. “What kind of law can nuns and priests teach?”—Judy clerked for a federal judge and then was hired as an Assistant US Attorney in Boston. She was assigned to the organized crime strike force and was eventually tapped to head it. Katz had a knack for chasing and prosecuting bad guys. Even more surprising to the five-foot-four-inch attorney was the almost sexual thrill she felt locking eyes with the third-generation Boston Irish and Italian hoodlums as they stood silently before the magistrate judge at their arraignments.