“Enough, Ben,” Katz interrupted. “Tell me, if we didn’t arrest criminals, who did we arrest?”
“Jews, Judy, Jews. It’s all over the news. Hundreds, actually thousands of Jews were taken into custody last night and are being held. Not criminals. Jews were arrested.”
Shapiro’s words were beyond comprehension, as if he spoke in Swahili. Then Judy remembered her odd lunch the day before.
“Oh my God, Ben,” she said, looking around her nearly empty office. It suddenly dawned on her that the man she was speaking with was himself a Jew and a civil rights lawyer. “Ben, I think it’s time we met. Can I come by your office sometime soon? No, come to think of it, I’d rather not meet at your office, just in case. Can we casually just happen to both have lunch around noon tomorrow? I have something to talk about with you. Okay?”
“Sure, Judy. Meet me at the Sultan’s. Do you know that place?”
“I’ve heard of it. See you there.”
CHAPTER 20
President Quaid showed his agitation as Attorney General McQueeney and two deputy attorneys general walked into the Oval Office. Quaid gestured for them to sit. He remained standing, glowering, hands on his hips as he looked down at McQueeney. She was exhausted. Awake all night through the arrests, she’d flown to Washington at dawn when summoned by the president for a nine o’clock meeting.
“Dammit, Queen. What the fuck happened out there? How the hell did those agents let themselves get killed like that? Aren’t they trained better than to walk through a door at two in the morning without even carrying their weapons? Whose fucked up idea was it that the agents wouldn’t carry weapons? I want that guy’s head.”
“Well, that guy was me,” McQueeney said. “And as you know, Mr. President, I offered you my head, and my job, before this operation even started. I wanted nothing to do with it. You gave me no choice, sir.”
“You know better than that,” President Quaid barked. “When I give you a job to do, your job is to do it, and do it right. Right now I’ve got two dead FBI agents to add to the body count from the dead Coasties. This is starting to look like a brand-new Boston Massacre up there, and we’re the ones getting massacred. My problem right now is the muttering I’m hearing about who is doing the killings. I don’t like it one bit. I don’t like what I’m hearing.”
“The bigger problem we’ve got, sir, is that we took almost five thousand people into custody last night and we have no way to handle them. This whole thing was put together in such a rush, and in so much secrecy, that we didn’t have time to think through the details, sir, details such as are we going to hold all these people or release them on bail? The Boston people we can take care of; they won’t go anywhere if we let them out on bail. But all those people off the boats, they have nobody here, nothing to their names. They can’t afford to hire lawyers, and there aren’t enough lawyers in Boston to appoint to represent them all—not ones who know what they’re doing in a case like this.”
“Dammit, Queen, don’t bother me with details. Figure it out.”
“What are we going to do with these people? They’re families mostly, husbands, wives, children. Do we separate the husbands and wives in detention, or do we leave them together? If we separate them, what happens to their children? The Massachusetts Department of Social Services head just laughed when I asked her if she could take custody of nine hundred kids tomorrow. What are we going to do with these people? If we book them and release them, you know we’ll never see these people again. And, Mr. President, don’t you dare suggest we put the children in cages like you-know-who did with other refugee kids.”
Quaid was taken aback by that.
“We don’t release the Israelis, Queen,” the president said. “What kind of fool would I look like going to all that trouble, and losing two FBI agents? We go through all that to round these people up, only to let them loose the next day. They’d disappear on us for sure. I’d look like a horse’s ass for sure, now wouldn’t I? Queen, you are going to hold onto those people—grandparents, parents, children and Chihuahuas—until we find someplace to put them. Do you understand?”
“Sir, Mr. President, with all due respect, how are we going to charge these people? I certainly appreciate that there are dead coastguardsmen and two federal agents. The district attorney in Boston is holding a guy from the ships in the county jail. They got him because he swam to the wrong shore and into the hands of the Boston cops. The DA’s charged the guy with ten counts of first-degree murder.
“There is nothing that makes him any different from the other people we rounded up. If the state charges him with conspiracy to murder, then they all are murderers. If we let everybody else go, then I’m going to be faced with one angry district attorney whose murder case will go down the tubes.” McQueeney glared at the president. “Please, sir, don’t ask me to charge five thousand people with murder and expect those charges to stick. That just isn’t going to happen.”
The two deputy attorneys general who’d accompanied their boss to the Oval Office watched silently, their heads turning in unison from one speaker to the other, like front row spectators at the Olympic ping pong finals.
“Nobody from the ships gets turned loose, Queen,” President Quaid said sternly, standing directly in front of the seated attorney general, his legs spread apart, his hands on his hips. His initial frenzy had subsided almost to a monotone.
McQueeney was undeterred. “We’re holding these people at a basketball stadium at Boston University, and we have that only because the stadium was built on the location of a former National Guard armory and somebody inserted some bizarre language into the purchase agreement that the government can preempt any other use of the stadium in a time of national emergency. So we’re holding five thousand people in a basketball stadium for today.
“But that won’t last long. The TV crews are having a field day there, interviewing Jewish grandmothers who came off that ship, spent a few days in suburban land visiting shopping malls, and now find themselves crammed into a domed stadium wondering if they are going to be shipped off to Syrian concentration camps. It’s going to make great copy. Remember Katrina and the Superdome? Think Jewish instead of black. That’s tonight’s news, sir.”
Before President Quaid could reply the telephone on his desk rang.
“Good, send him in,” he said. “Grant Farrell is here. I woke him this morning with the news of the roundup last night, and I asked him to spend the morning speaking with folks on the Hill. I want to hear what he has to say.”
Grant Farrell, Democratic minority leader of the Senate, entered. He did not look pleased.
“Mr. President, Madam Attorney General.”
“So, how are folks taking the latest news, Grant?” the president asked.
“Not well, sir, not well at all. Each and every senator I spoke with this morning—and I got to people on both sides of the aisle, Mr. President—the first thing every single person said was about the two dead agents, not about what a good job we did rounding people up, not about what a difficult decision this must have been, not even, as I would have expected, some song and dance about civil rights after we dragged a thousand citizens from their beds and hauled them off. No sir, it was all about the dead agents.”
The president glared at his attorney general.
“Let me tell you what Senator Jackwell said; you know, Jake Jackwell, Wisconsin, as screamer of a liberal as we’ve got on board. Well, Jake dragged me off to the side of the senators’locker room this morning when I was only halfway into my workout gear and said—here’s as good a quote as I can give you, sir, and these are his words, not mine—he said the score seems to be Jews twelve, Americans zero. Then he asked me, when do we start to even things up?”