He turned to his wife.
“I’ll be home soon. This is all a mistake. Call the lawyer, Estelle.” He turned to walk away. “Estelle.” He turned back and held both her hands. “This was my decision, not yours. We did the right thing. Estelle, I love you.”
Estelle immediately ran into the house and picked up the telephone receiver, dialing for directory assistance. She held the phone to her ear, puzzled. The telephone was dead.
CHAPTER 17
Jonathan Kantor had not left his house since the bomb destroyed Tel Aviv. One thought ran through his mind like a Motown song, repeating constantly. Without control.
I should have been there. It should have been me. I should have been there. It should have been me.
Kantor’s wife, Elaine, and their twin daughters, Rachel and Rebecca, were visiting Elaine’s parents in Israel. Jonathan had planned to join his family on the three-week vacation until his boss, a partner in a premier patent law firm in Boston, struck a tree on his mountain bike and ended up flat on his back for weeks. Kantor was at his desk when his wife and children were incinerated in her parents’Tel Aviv condominium.
I should have been there. It should have been me.
Kantor’s Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle lay on the kitchen table, looking as out of place as a dog turd on a Persian rug. Kantor bought the gun three years earlier after two men jimmied a living room window and crept into the house while he and Elaine were sleeping, only to run from the house when a police car drove by with its siren blaring. The weapon had never been fired. Having it was enough for Kantor. It went into the bedroom closet, bullets in the clip, ready to fire the next time there were late-night footsteps on the stairway. That was all he wanted. He was satisfied.
The weapon was moved from the closet to the kitchen table a week after Tel Aviv.
Kantor watched television news, absorbing everything he could from Israel—or what had been Israel. When word reached the leadership of the North Shore Jewish Council that Elaine and the Kantor girls had been in Tel Aviv, calls were made to Kantor. He was invited to memorial services, to substitute funerals. He was urged to join others in grieving.
He stayed home thinking for the first time in his life of what it meant to him to be Jewish. It had not meant anything in particular—until now. Blatant anti-Semitism was something that happened in other times. In other places. To other people. Years ago. In Europe. Not here. Not here in America
Kantor and his family, like most American Jews, had been untouched by anti-Semitism. Now, all he could think about was how the Jew-haters and killers could get to him, too. They took his wife, his daughters.
When the phone call came asking if he could put a few people up for a few nights, the words went in one ear and out the other. Kantor did not remember how he answered. But his name had made a list, a list of people called for help. And next to his name, next to Jonathan Kantor, 26 Endicott Drive, Peabody, Massachusetts was a check mark.
Kantor slept in front of the television, listening for footsteps. Some nights he sat at his bedroom window and stared at the dark street until the sky lightened.
That was what Kantor was doing when he tried to comprehend what was happening on his street. Black cars, no police markings but lots of radio antennas, stopped in front of houses. Pairs of men in dark suits rang doorbells and went inside. At one thirty in the morning, at two. Not all the houses, just a few. And then people came out their doors, neighbors, some people he knew well, some he barely recognized. And with them were other people, families it seemed—people Kantor did not recognize. They were led to the sidewalk and placed in clusters, standing there until a yellow Peabody school bus appeared and rolled slowly down the street, stopping at each cluster for the people to get on board, then rolling on to the next group of people, where they, too, got on.
All in silence, all without Kantor hearing a word spoken. All up and down quiet Endicott Drive. Kantor was stunned and could not figure out what was happening or even whether he was so sleep-deprived that he was hallucinating.
Then he understood which houses the men were going to, which people were being led to the yellow bus. “They’re rounding up Jews,” Kantor said out loud. “They are skipping the Christian houses. They are rounding up Jews. They’re arresting all the Jews in Peabody… I’m next.”
He looked out the window. A black SUV stopped in front of his house. Two men got out and walked toward his door.
Am I hallucinating? Is this real? he thought.
POUND POUND POUND.
It sounded like a hammer on his front door. Kantor stood. Looked around frantically. He looked at the window. Should I jump out and run away? The window led to the garage roof. He took a step toward the window and stopped.
POUND POUND POUND.
If they’re waiting in front, they’ll be waiting in the back. He looked toward the hallway door, half expecting two men to walk into the bedroom.
Then Kantor’s eyes slowly moved toward the bedroom closet, where his carefully pressed suits and polished black shoes were lined up. The bedroom closet where he kept his gun.
Kantor’s legs buckled as he realized there was no gun in the closet. The gun was on his kitchen table.
POUND POUND POUND.
Kantor raced from the bedroom and down the stairs, almost falling over his feet as he hit the bottom landing and turned toward the kitchen, running inside his own house faster than he had since the day he and Elaine moved in. He heard a jiggling, clinking sound from the door jimmy the men used to force the lock as he reached the kitchen and snatched the Bushmaster from the table, reaching forward to slam the fifteen-round ammunition clip home.
He turned and faced the front door as FBI agents William Moriarty and Angelo Ansella threw the door open and walked slowly into the dark entryway.
“Is anybody home,” Moriarty yelled. “Is Jonathan Kantor here?”
They know my name, Kantor thought.
Kantor did not wait for the two men to see him walking from the kitchen into the front hallway. As soon as he saw the men, Kantor raised the rifle, jerked the trigger again and again and again until the two men lay on the floor, motionless.
Then Kantor sat in his living room and waited for the other men, the ones he knew would still come to round up Jews.
Fifteen minutes later, tear gas canisters crashed through windows from all sides of his house. Kantor ran out the back door, firing the Bushmaster without aiming until he ran out of ammunition. He was lifting it over his head to demonstrate that it was empty when bullets from three sharpshooters’rifles pulverized his skull.
Kantor had time for one last thought.
It should have been me.
CHAPTER 18
Monhegan Island appeared as a blur on the horizon as the fog lifted and the boat sailed on the morning breeze. Levi and Reuben had spent hours debating where to make their landfall. There hadn’t been a whole lot to talk about on the three-week nonstop sail from Jost van Dyke to Maine. When the wind increased, the boat sailed faster. When the wind slowed, the boat slowed. Levi was scrupulous about not using the engine, saving what little diesel fuel the boat had on board.
With one exception, the weather had been favorable—generally soft winds, increasing during the day, lessening at night. Once in a while, the wind disappeared entirely and the boat flopped from side to side, motionless, making no forward progress at all. When that happened, they waited, as sailors have waited for the wind to return for thousands of years. And as it did for thousands of years, the wind always returned and their forward journey resumed.