There was no word from them now. The Canasta Crew is in a concentration camp, Judy Katz thought. Where does that leave me? I’m an American. My government is doing this. Shit, a week ago I worked for that government.
Katz thought about reporting back to work to help the office get through this emergency. Then she remembered the secret meetings before the arrests, the meetings she was excluded from. She lay in bed, eyes closed. She saw an image of her grandmother standing behind a wire fence, thin fingers poking through holes in the wire mesh, staring at her, wondering when her Judilah would take her away from this oh-so-familiar hell, a hell from her darkest, oldest memories.
Downstairs, Shapiro didn’t know what to make of the other woman he was introduced to at the house in Portland—Debra Reuben, the Israeli cabinet member. She seemed to live in a void filled by staring out the window at the busy street, and by alcohol.
Shapiro quickly recognized in Reuben an emptiness that he shared. She, too, seemed to be waiting to see somebody walk through the front door, somebody her conscious mind knew would never arrive—somebody her emotions had not yet accepted as gone forever.
The second night after his arrival, Shapiro sat on the living room sofa late into the evening, alone in the room with Debra Reuben. Earlier, Shapiro and Abram Goldhersh had worked their way through the remaining half bottle of Lagavulin. Shapiro enjoyed the warm feeling good single malt left him with, crediting the distillers on the long ago and far away island of Islay off Scotland’s foul southwest coast for the magical effect of their concoction.
Sarah and Abram Goldhersh had long since gone to bed, as had Katz, leaving Shapiro and Reuben in the living room, him on the sofa, her in an overstuffed armchair.
“My wife used to tease me for being a Pollyanna,” Shapiro said, trying not to let any hint of a slur slip into his speech, despite the Scotch warming his stomach like a peat fire. “That’s what I would always say—don’t worry, it will turn out for the best. That was me. ‘Pollyanna Shapiro’she used to call me. She should hear me now. I don’t see any hope, any way this situation is going to turn out for the best.”
Reuben had taken an instant liking to this attorney. Hearing how he escaped from the FBI agents at his home, she’d sensed the same self-confidence that had attracted her to Levi. Ben Shapiro did not seem like a man who would give up easily. That he sounded so despondent now was either an indication of the desperation of the situation or a result of his tragic loss, she concluded.
“My whole life has been devoted to solving problems—other peoples’problems, sure, but taking on what they thought were impossible battles and fighting them. Sometimes I won.” He looked up, directly into her eyes. Smiled. “I won a lot more than I lost, you know. I was pretty good. I was a damned good trial lawyer.
“I believed in the system, the legal system, even the political system. The Rule of Law, that’s what they called it in law school. This country is built on the Rule of Law, the professors told us. I used to believe that, you know.
“I believed in the first ten amendments to the Constitution a lot more than I believed in the Ten Commandments. And I even believed that politics was like a pendulum. Sometimes it swung my way, sometimes the other way. But it always swung back, and always toward the center, never too far one way or the other.”
“And now, what do you believe now?” Reuben asked, drawn into his story as he’d drawn so many hundreds of jurors into his way of seeing the facts of a case.
“You heard him on TV, didn’t you?” Shapiro said, angry. “You know, I voted for the guy, Quaid. I liked him—moderate, not too liberal to get elected. Never in a million years would I have expected him to give in to… to… I don’t know, to the dark side this way.”
Reuben unconsciously echoed his emotions, angry when he was angry, smiling when he smiled. That was the effect a good trial lawyer giving a good closing argument hoped for from a jury.
“I can’t accept that all those people, all those hundreds of thousands of people who stood and sat and cheered and clapped right in front of me in Washington, all those people are now behind barbed wire in some sort of American concentration camps. The man has lost his mind.”
“But don’t you think there are people who will stop him?” Reuben asked. “There are people in the Senate, in Congress, who won’t stand for this, aren’t there?
“Evidently not,” he replied bitterly. “You saw on TV, you saw what Congress did. Suspended habeas corpus. My God, maybe because I’m a lawyer, but I know what that means. It means they locked the doors to the courthouses and handed Quaid the keys.”
They sat silently in the living room, Shapiro exhausted both by the Scotch and the depth of his despondency.
“I know what you mean. I’ve lost my country, too,” Reuben said softly. “Both countries, actually, but especially my adopted home. My friends, my neighbors, the baker I bought my loaf of bread from every few days, the librarian who put each new Creighton book aside for me. All those people. I don’t know if they’re dead or alive. Maybe some of them are in camps, detention camps over there. I don’t know which would be worse. Maybe a quick death would be more merciful.”
She looked up from the floor, where she directed her words, and noticed that Shapiro’s eyes welled with tears.
“I hoped coming here I could change things. I hoped Chaim and I could make it better. Now he’s gone and my hope is gone, too.”
“You came to America with more than hope,” he said. “You brought something with you.” He gestured toward the window. Outside was the swimming pool, its cover still in place. “You must have had something in mind when you brought that.”
“Honestly, I didn’t have any plans for it,” she said. “At first, all we knew was that we had to get it out of the country. We couldn’t let the Arabs get their hands on it. That was reason enough. Later, once I got it away from Israel and the boat took me to Spain, I wasn’t prepared to dispose of it. It’s not something that you can leave in a trash can, is it?”
“I suppose not,” Shapiro said.
“I wanted to get back to America. That was all I knew then—as much planning as I was able to do. I found Levi and that boat he had and it made sense to bring the thing with me. I even thought I might turn it over to the government for safekeeping. Once we got here, though, and I saw that America was not going to be Israel’s white knight, that America was not going to make everything better again, I realized that maybe I was here, with what I had with me here, for a purpose. You know, Ben, I truly believe that there is a reason why I’m here, why all of us are where we are right now, and that reason also includes what we have out there in the pool.”
“Have you thought of what that one bomb can do?” Shapiro asked.
Reuben did not answer. Instead, she stood up slowly from the chair and took a step toward the sofa. She leaned down toward him and softly kissed him on the right cheek.
“I hurt too much to talk about the bomb now. Good night, Ben,” she said. “I enjoyed talking with you. I think we’ll both sleep better tonight.”
She took two steps toward the stairs, then stopped and turned toward him.
“Ben,” she said, a new sadness coming to her voice. “Ben, I know better than anybody else in the whole world what that bomb can do. I’ve lived, in a way, with what that bomb can do. You’re right, it would change everything. Everything. I just don’t know how it would change—if one more bomb, a third bomb, can possibly make better what the first two bombs made so terribly wrong. All I know is that what is happening in this country has to be stopped. I have no doubts about that. And I suspect that it is us”—she gestured upstairs, toward where Judy Katz, where Abram and Sarah Goldberg-Goldhersh were sleeping. “It is this group who will be making that happen.”