“Conspiracy to commit murder,” one attorney said.
“Harboring fugitives. Or maybe obstruction of justice?” said another.
“Catch and release,” a third suggested. “Just like striped bass. We caught them, we taught them a lesson they won’t forget, now we slap their wrists and send them home, that’s what I say. We can’t charge a thousand people with murder.”
McQueeney turned to Anderson.
“Arnie, what do you say?”
“Split the difference,” he said, looking for the political compromise. “We’ve got open-and-shut cases on harboring fugitives. After all, we took those boat people out of each of their houses. Charge them for harboring, let them plead out, and fine them a thousand bucks each. There’s nearly a thousand of them. That’ll be a million bucks, which will just about cover all the overtime for this whole deal. That’s what I say.”
McQueeney sat back in her chair, tilted her head to look at the ceiling and stared silently for a minute. The president would not be happy with this solution. Well then, Quaid can go fuck himself, she thought. I’m the chief law enforcement officer of this country. He’s commander in chief of the military, not commander of the Justice Department. This is my call, not his.
Maybe now he’ll accept my resignation.
McQueeney leaned forward and looked Anderson in the eyes.
“I like that. Make it happen. Make this all go away.”
“Will do, boss,” Anderson said. “But this one isn’t going to go away.”
CHAPTER 23
Moishe Cohen felt obligated to take in a family from the ships. He lived in a large waterfront house in Marblehead, a yachting community north of Boston that had a substantial population of substantial Jews. Cohen thought many times about selling the house after his wife, Zelda, passed away from breast cancer three years earlier. He’d remained there more from inertia than for any other reason.
There was plenty of room for Walid ben Mizrachi’s family in the nearly empty house. The three teenagers spoke English well, having attended Israeli schools their entire lives. Their parents, however, struggled to learn Hebrew after their arrival from Yemen. Their English was limited to a few phrases they’d heard in movies.
Cohen had toyed with the idea of asking them to remain at the house, of taking on their adoption to America as a mitzvah—a good deed. They’d lost everything they owned in Israel and barely escaped with their lives. It was nice having children around the house, nice to take them in wide-eyed awe to the shopping mall. And he could find a place for Walid in the business.
Watching the startled ben Mizrachi family carted off by federal agents in the dark of the night was more terrifying to Cohen than even his own arrest had been. He did not expect to see them again. Ever. Like so many other Jews who’d been taken to camps and were never seen again.
Cohen had been placed on a yellow school bus filled with men pulled from their homes. Frighteningly, the bus was driven by a uniformed soldier. Cohen had watched dozens of yellow buses rendezvous at some sort of military camp in nearby Reading, Camp Curtis Guild. He’d never heard of the place and, in fact, did not know there were military camps in Massachusetts. But, then, what did he know of such things?
The buses had parked in a large open area, engines were shut down, and then nothing happened. The men had to use a porta-potty next to the driver’s seat, in plain sight of all the others. Cohen was too embarrassed to use the device. The ache in his bowels only added to his discomfort.
Some men dozed as the night wore on. Cohen had been unable to sleep. He recognized a few faces from synagogue and nodded to them. The man sitting next to Cohen made an attempt at conversation.
“I told Nadine we shouldn’t have gotten involved,” he said. “Taking in fugitives. Hiding them in our house. And then when I saw on TV about those people being killed on that Coast Guard boat. I told Nadine we had to get rid of these people, we had to. But would she listen to me? God knows, does she ever listen to me? No way. So what does she do? She takes them shopping. To the North Shore Mall, of all places.”
Cohen nodded, saying, “Good shops there, but expensive. I haven’t been there since Zelda, may she rest in peace, passed.”
He paused. Smiled. Remembering.
“No, that’s not right. I took the kids there last week.”
“Nadine grew up around here and she grew up surrounded by Jews,” the man, Harry Mason as he’d introduced himself, continued. “I told her, I don’t know how many times, Nadine, I said, when you grow up the only Jews in a small town in Pennsylvania, like I did, you know better. I told her, Nadine, Jews better not rock the boat. I told her, Nadine, when Jews rock the boat, Jews are the first ones who fall in the water. That’s what I told her, but did she listen? Never. So what do you think they’re gonna do with us?”
Cohen shook his head. He had no idea why he’d been arrested, or even if he was arrested. He pretended to sleep.
An image surfaced in Cohen’s mind of a similar journey he took when he was nine years old, in Poland. Rather than a bus, he’d been on a train, a freight car. And rather than being surrounded by men, the freight car was filled with families, old, young, children, men, women, girls, boys, strong, weak, healthy, sick, frightened. All frightened. All Jews. He’d spent a week in that freight car, a week with only the food they’d brought with them, a week with only the little water they’d brought in jars, a week using a pile of straw in one corner as the communal toilet.
He’d been with his mother, his father, his grandfather Shmuel, Shmuel his hero, and his two little sisters, Emily and Sarah.
Finally, the train arrived at its destination, a railroad station in what looked like a small town. There were buildings in the distance and one tall smokestack, belching black smoke—the darkest, blackest smoke Cohen ever saw.
As the people stumbled from the freight car, soldiers lined them up and they passed in front of a table at which two men sat, one in a German officer’s uniform, one wearing a white coat, like a doctor. When the Cohen family stood at the table, the officer gestured at Cohen’s mother and sisters. Soldiers dragged them off to the side. The doctor glanced quickly at Cohen, his father, and his grandfather.
“Take the old one, too,” the doctor barked, and the soldiers took Shmuel, Cohen’s grandfather, and dragged him to where his mother and sisters stood trembling.
Cohen and his father were taken through a door and eventually to a wooden barracks. His father lived five weeks and then did not awaken one morning. Cohen persisted. And persisted.
Cohen never saw his mother, his sisters or his grandfather again.
His eyes opened quickly and his head jerked forward as he suddenly came awake. The images were so real. He’d seen the faces of his family and heard the cries of the people around him. Most frightening, however, he’d smelled smoke, a smell he’d inhaled every day for two and a half years in that camp.
Sitting in the yellow school bus as the eastern sky gradually lightened, surrounded by terrified Jews, Cohen smelled the smoke again and trembled. Shmuel, my hero.
This time, he thought, this time I’m the old man. The very old man.
Meals were distributed to the men, some sort of military food in packages marked Meals Ready to Eat. Cohen’s bus was sent to the Rockingham County Jail over the border in New Hampshire. The men were ushered off the bus and into several group cells, ten or twelve to a cell.
Nobody told the men what was to happen to them. It was not discourtesy; it was just that nobody knew.