As the day wore on Cohen became increasingly confused, unable to nap as most of the men were doing. His mind raced, jumping randomly, faster and faster from one thought to another as he lost all conscious control of his own thoughts.
I was a mensch, he thought. I survived for a reason. My life’s goal was to do good, to treat people the way God wants people treated. When other fabric mills left Massachusetts and moved to Carolina, to Alabama, to China, I stayed. I paid my people well. I provided health insurance. I produced good products, not schlock. I supported the synagogue. I gave money to Israel. I’ve lived to be such an old man. Why am I here? Why, after all these years and all I have done, why am I locked up surrounded by Jews who are locked up?
Cohen sat on the concrete floor and looked at his left forearm, at the row of numbers there. He smiled as he recalled the speech he’d given at the press conference a few days earlier. He recalled the words that brought a room full of news reporters, cameras, television lights and all, to absolute silence.
“Never again,” he mumbled out loud. “Never again, never again.”
Moishe Cohen closed his eyes, rolled his head back so his shut eyelids were facing heaven and silently asked Zelda what he should do.
“Not again, Zeldala. I can’t go through it again.”
Cohen stood, then slowly walked among the men to the far corner of the cell, where the toilet was located beneath a barred window. His trousers dropped to the floor. He knotted one pants leg into a loop and quietly placed it over his head. Climbing on the toilet seat, Cohen reached up on his toes and tied the other trouser leg to the window bars as high as he could reach.
Taking one last look at the men in the cell, dozing or talking softly among themselves in groups as far from the smelly toilet as they could get, Cohen whispered the prayer that had comforted him through his years in the German camp.
“Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Elohaynu Adonai Echad.” Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.
Moishe Cohen, millionaire industrialist, stepped off the toilet seat in the drunk tank of the Rockingham County Jail and dangled from his knotted pants. He’d stopped breathing by the time anybody noticed the old man in the corner.
CHAPTER 24
Abram and Sarah Goldhersh got a room at the Brooklin Inn and stayed overnight. The next morning at breakfast they still could talk about nothing but the events in Israel and Boston. Levi’s mind drifted. After three days in Brooklin, Levi was concerned they would soon attract unwanted attention. He wanted to find a place to stay on shore, and he wanted to remove the object from the boat and find a safe place to hide it.
Abram Goldhersh would not stop talking. He grew increasingly more excited.
“They’ve jailed thousands of Jews, thousands of Israeli citizens, and all you want to do is march around carrying signs saying ‘Let My People Go,’” he said, speaking to his wife, Sarah, in a tone so exasperated he sounded like a teenager whose voice was cracking. “Sarah, you know what sort of things I’ve been running around the country collecting the past few years. I’ve done that because Jews, at least Jews in Eretz Yisrael, learned that carrying a sign gets attention, but carrying a gun gets results.”
“That is Israel and this is America,” Sarah said to her husband. “You walk around Boston with a gun now and you’ll wind up behind bars and that won’t do anybody—anybody—any good, will it, Mr. Shoot-em-Up? We have some very prominent people coming to this march— politicians, actors, business people. Besides, those poor people have been in that stadium for almost a week now. They have to let them out. What else is the government going to do with them?”
Debra Reuben interrupted. “Sarah, I understand all that, but Chaim and I have a more immediate concern. We can’t stay on that boat much longer; at least, I know that I can’t stand it. We need someplace to stay. Do you have any suggestions?”
Levi interrupted before Sarah could respond.
“And it has to be someplace, can I use the phrase, ‘out of the way.’There is a slight chance that the government may take some interest in us,” Levi said. “I assume that an Israeli naval officer and a former cabinet minister aren’t high on America’s invitation list right now. I myself would rather not be locked up in any stadium.”
Goldhersh looked at the former Israeli naval officer closely. Reuben had been part of an Israeli government that Goldhersh viewed as weak, as far too willing to compromise with Arabs. Here she was now, though, with an in-the-flesh member of the Israeli military. He placed an arm on Levi’s shoulder.
“Well, Chaim, I’d like to have you not too far away,” Abram said. “I was never in the military, you know, and I wouldn’t mind having somebody look at my warehouse who knows something about weapons and explosives. I got quite a deal on some drums of something labeled C4. I know that’s an explosive, but that’s about all I know.”
“C4? That sure is an explosive,” Levi answered. “We trained with that for commando operations in the navy. Half the C4 in the world is manufactured, or was manufactured, in Israel. It is a magnificent weapon as long as you remember that it packs a bigger bang than TNT. You can mold it like modeling clay. You can drop it from the roof and it won’t go off, but use the right detonator and its child’s play to make a big boom with it.
“I set off some great bangs in training. We’d leave our patrol boat at night, run a rubber boat up a beach and rush ashore to the target—all in training, never did it for real—stuff it with C4 and set the detonators, then run for the rubber boats.” He looked at the other man oddly. “How in hell did you get that stuff, Abram?”
“Let’s just say that I spent a lot of time hanging around Army bases. I got to know some gentlemen marketing heroin. Once they learned how much more I’d pay for toys like that C4, they started taking payment from their soldier customers in goods rather than cash. That way they made money from both ends of the deal. It was all in a good cause,” Abram said. “I doubt the Army knew what it was missing.”
“Stop that kind of talk,” Sarah said, looking at her husband with a not-very-loving expression. “Boys and explosives and guns. Stop it.”
The huge man obeyed his wife’s command, for the moment. Levi saw Abram’s eyes light with excitement—not uncontrolled anger—when he talked about the drums of explosives in his warehouse. Drums of C4, Levi thought. That will get some attention.
Sarah interrupted Levi’s reverie.
“Debra, Chaim, I have an idea about a place where you two could stay. I’ll have to make a phone call first, but I think it could work out very well. Remember, Debbie, I told you that I knew somebody with a vacation cottage here in Brooklin? Well, she’s Nancy Lowenstein, married to Arthur Lowenstein. He’s the CEO or the chairman or something of KGR Insurance, that big insurance company that advertises all over TV and the newspapers. They have a summer cottage here on the water.
“I know Nancy from a fundraising campaign she and I managed together for Ethiopian Jewish children. It was so beautiful; those children are so beautiful. Imagine, black Jews. We raised over five million for them. Nancy broke her back working so hard, and broke her husband’s bank account. We had an event at their house here. Nancy told me they’d had their caretaker come by to turn on the water and electricity because they hadn’t been to the house in two years themselves.”
Sarah smiled at a memory.
“Nancy was so excited to do something for Israel. And she was charmed by an Israeli man who hinted that the money was not going to be used entirely to help poor black Jewish kids. Nancy thought he was involved with the Mossad—you know, the Israeli secret service?”