Never Again

by M. A. Rothman

  As Zalman’s prayer rang through the home, Levi looked at everyone around the table. They were all mouthing the same words, with their heads slightly bowed.

  They then prayed over the wine, and finally over the bread. And then it was time to eat.

  He glanced at Lucy, and their eyes met. She smiled and gave him a wink.

  There was a wholesome feel to this gathering. It reminded him of his Amish upbringing in some ways. Even though he’d left his Amish community when he was eighteen and had never really looked back, he’d also never outright rejected formal religion as a groundwork for beliefs. These people believed in what they practiced, as did his family, and that was something he could relate to, even if he didn’t share in the day-to-day practices of either of them.

  Menachem handed him a piece of the braided egg bread that was traditional for the Sabbath. “I wonder,” he said, “do you like gefilte fish?”

  Levi shrugged. “I don’t know what a gefilte is, but I like fish. I’ll try anything that you put in front of me.”

  Zalman leaned over with an amused expression. “It’s okay if you don’t like it. I’m not a fan either.”

  And that started a heated debate over gefilte fish that led to other amusing discussions that occupied the better part of two hours.

  ###

  After dinner, Rivka led Levi, Lucy, and Menachem up the narrow stairs to a closed door. She pulled a key from a hidden pocket in her dress and unlocked the door. “This is Mendel’s office. It hasn’t been touched since the break-in. Please, have a seat.”

  Lights automatically turned on as they entered the room. Levi had learned during his visit that this was a feature in some Orthodox Jewish households.

  Levi followed Menachem and Lucy into a cramped study filled with a large desk. It was a working office, that was obvious. Two of the walls had built-in shelves crammed with books. Nothing fancy, just lots of books on random topics, including an Encyclopedia Britannica from 1969 that occupying one entire shelf. Many of the books had Hebrew letters on their binders.

  Levi turned to Rivka. “Can you start from the beginning? What exactly did your husband do?”

  She closed the door to the office. “He was a consumer reporter. It was his passion.” She smiled, looking much calmer than she had at the bar. “It was how we met many years ago.”

  “What kind of things did he report on? And where? Was it for TV stations, the newspaper…?”

  “Mostly newspaper, but sometimes he’d be interviewed on television. When he started, he had a column in the local papers.” She blushed and pursed her lips. “You’ll probably think it’s silly, but back then he would investigate kosher restaurants and report any violations or questionable behaviors so that others would be warned. That eventually led to him reporting on international food imports and exports, and that’s when the Intelligencer picked him up.”

  The Intelligencer was a huge newspaper with millions of daily readers. “Is that where he worked most recently?” Levi asked.

  “Yes. And he became agitated about things at work, and I suppose that’s what you want to know about. He told me about some of it. Over the last couple years, he’d noticed how some of his work was being edited to remove names, or it was not being run at all, even though the local editor had given his approval.”

  “Isn’t that pretty normal?” Lucy asked. “From what I understand, there’s usually more stories than there’s space to print, isn’t there?”

  Rivka nodded. “True, but Mendel’s been doing this for over twenty years… I mean… he had been doing it for that long.” She sighed. “And even though it was his job to warn people about problems, he always gave the targets of his stories the benefit of the doubt. It would ruin him professionally if he wrote anything that was inaccurate or misleading.

  “But he confided something to me that he wasn’t yet prepared to put into print. In fact, he wasn’t sure if he ever would be. He was almost convinced that the company he was working for was purposefully trying to deceive its readers. To shape the narrative, if you will.”

  Levi frowned. “I don’t understand. Isn’t that a newspaper’s job? I see outlandish stuff in the papers all the time.”

  “That’s the editorial sections. My husband worked in what people in the trade like to call hard news. It should involve no opinions, just the facts. But Mendel was convinced that the management at the paper wasn’t interested in telling their millions of readers the truth.”

  “Okay,” Levi said. “I understand why that would upset your husband. But do you really think that would be cause for him to be murdered?”

  Menachem cleared his throat. “My brother-in-law was a very righteous man. He felt it was his calling to bring the truth to the people. You need to realize that to him, what the paper was doing was a sin. I also heard plenty from him in the last year about this issue. He made it clear that even though the newspaper never lied, by ensuring certain things were never said in print, they molded the public narrative. It was a sin of omission.”

  Lucy nodded in understanding. “I suppose it would be like talking about how a police officer shot a teenager on the streets, and leaving out the fact that the teenager was aiming a gun at him.”

  “Exactly,” Rivka affirmed. “Anyway, in the days just before Mendel died, he was particularly upset. He wouldn’t talk about it, even to me. And then… and then he was dead.”

  “And you think he was murdered because…?”

  Rivka picked up a manila folder from the desk and handed it to Levi. “That’s the medical examiner’s report. They said he was poisoned, though they labeled the manner of death as undetermined.” She took in a deep shuddering breath. “But later, the manner was changed to suicide based on the testimony of someone who had to be lying.”

  Levi recalled what Lucy had told him about the claim of an affair. He wasn’t going to push that for the moment. He flipped through the folder. It also contained a police report, with some names redacted.

  “You mentioned a break-in,” he said. “Tell me about that.”

  Rivka hid her face and began sobbing. Menachem patted her shoulder, and Lucy moved closer to her and handed her a tissue from a nearby dispenser.

  Her uncle responded for her. “It happened during Mendel’s funeral. Someone broke in and tossed this office, and touched nothing else in the house. Whoever did it had to know we were all gone for the funeral.”

  Levi thought of the ornate silver menorah and all the other valuable items he’d seen downstairs. “What was in here worth taking and ignoring the rest of the house?”

  “We don’t know.” Rivka wiped her face, looking both distraught and embarrassed. “They took all the books off the shelves, emptied his drawers, and the only thing I know of that was missing was his work notebook.”

  “They stole his laptop?”

  “No, a spiral notebook. Mendel preferred writing things longhand. I know it was on his desk, where he always had it. But it was gone.”

  Levi surveyed the office. There was something definitely not right about this. What could possibly be so important in a reporter’s notes that they’d break in to steal them?

  Levi stepped over to the mahogany desk and pulled open one of the drawers. It was full of empty file folders. The notebook had been lying in plain sight on top of the desk, yet the intruder had seemingly gone to the trouble of ransacking the drawers and shelves as well.

  “Do you know what he kept in these drawers?” he asked.

  “Not specifically,” Rivka said. “When we cleaned up, we just put things back where it felt like they belonged.”

  He exchanged a glance with Lucy. They were both almost certainly thinking the same thing. Not just a notebook was missing.

  On top of the desk was a book with Hebrew writing. Levi thumbed through its pages of unintelligible script and stopped when he discovered a yellow sticky note. There were seven names written on the paper, with an arrow pointing to some of the He
brew print in the book.

  He turned the book toward Menachem and Rivka. “What does it say in the section the arrow is pointing to?”

  Menachem leaned forward and squinted through his thick glasses. “Ah, this chapter of the Bible would be what you call Proverbs. This section says, ‘A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaks lies shall not escape.’”

  Rivka smiled. “That would be just like Mendel. He’d find a passage with layers of meaning to him.”

  Levi drummed his fingers on the desk. He wasn’t sure what to make of all this. But the least he could do was track down whoever had given the testimonial and learn about the truth of the affair.

  He removed the sticky note from the book and noticed that it had more writing on the back, in Hebrew. He showed it to Rivka. “What does this say?”

  She leaned forward, and her face grew pale. “It says, ‘It’s the Nazis.’”

  Chapter Five

  The engines of the lunar shuttle hummed, thrusting Dave heavily against his take-off seat as the ship rocketed from the surface of the Moon. Glancing across the cargo bay, his gaze settled on the lunar rover parked only ten feet away. When he noticed that two of the horizontal thrusters had been damaged on the vehicle and they’d have to be fixed, he let out a silent groan. If they weren’t fixed, the entire launch mission would be a waste of time.

  Unbuckling his harness, Dave took a step and immediately slammed hard against the deck of the cargo hold—the full effect of the shuttle’s g-forces pushed him to the floor. With a grunt of exertion, he righted himself and crawled toward the heavily-modified rover parked next to a tremendous spool of graphene, the carbon-nanotube ribbon he’d soon be deploying.

  For years, graphene had been a darling substance of research scientists. Being two hundred times stronger than steel by weight, as well as an extremely efficient conductor of both heat and electricity, it was a fundamental component to many basic advances in scientific research. But Dave was long past the research phase. For him and everyone else on the Moon colonies, graphene would ultimately be a key ingredient in saving their lives.

  Wearing the required spacesuit, Dave struggled against the ever-present forces as he peered under the front edge of the rover. “We’ve got damage to the aft thrusters, but I think I can fix it.”

  “Mister Carter,” the disembodied voice of the shuttle captain echoed loudly in his helmet, calling him by the assumed name Dave had been using since his arrival on the Moon four years earlier. “Are you certain you’re qualified to make such repairs?”

  Dave rolled his eyes as he opened one of the cargo bay’s tool chests, retrieved a pry bar, and wedged it into the valve’s opening. “Don’t you worry your pretty head,” he grunted as he strained against the bar, trying to pry open the valve as the metal groaned in protest.

  As Dave strained every muscle he had, trying to open one of the thrust valves on the rover, he admonished himself for his carelessness under his breath. “I must have landed the damned thing too hard on a rocky outcropping and bent the hell out of this.”

  In his helmet, he heard the pilot sniff with disdain. He knew the woman who was piloting the ship, and she’d always been a prissy, self-important bitch who looked down on all the miners. She never said anything rude, but her condescending tone nearly drove him crazy.

  Slowly, the valve began to give way, its yawning mouth finally showing the opening to the thrust jet. Setting aside the pry bar, Dave peered inside the thruster and groaned. Wedged deep inside was a lunar rock that he’d need to retrieve, and to do that, he’d have to take the entire jet assembly apart.

  Grabbing a screwdriver, he lay under the rover and began to work on the assembly. With the thrusters still pressing him against the floor, just lifting his arms was a struggle. As he tried to manipulate the screwdriver, Dave grew ever more frustrated. The thick fingers of his gloves made fine motor movement nearly impossible.

  “This crap would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to wear this monkey suit, you know.”

  “Mister Carter, you do realize that it’s for your own safety, don’t you?”

  Dave tried to wipe his forehead, and immediately realized the stupidity of that move as beads of sweat dripped into his eyes. He let loose on the voice projecting fake concern from within her cockpit. “Oh, fuck off, you glorified tour guide. I’m not the one sitting pretty pressing a button every once in a while. Some people are actually working here, you know?”

  “Chief Hostetler warned me that you get grumpy, so I’ll ignore your rudeness and do my job. Why don’t you just do yours?” A rash of static echoed through the speaker in Dave’s helmet and the voice of the pilot muttered, “Typical miner trash. Not sure why I bother talking to them. They’re all uneducated vulgarians of the first order.”

  Dave’s mood lifted as he realized that the pilot must have accidentally left her transmitter on.

  Having posed as one of the Moon Colony’s miners for nearly four years, he’d admittedly gained some rough edges and had managed to fit right in with the rest of the workers. Fitting in was the only way Dave could have made any progress on his plans and be assured that he wouldn’t be found out. Only the mining company’s Chief of Operations knew who he really was: the same Chief Hostetler who had actually quit a rather high-level position at the ISF under protest when Dave’s troubles were made public.

  Blinking sweat from his eyes, Dave continued his work, knowing that he’d likely be at it for hours.

  ###

  Dave grabbed a metal file and scraped at one of the freshly reassembled thruster valves on the side of the rover. It had been his idea to use the rover to help deploy the space elevators, and so far, it had worked perfectly.

  The shuttle’s vertical thrusters had ceased their acceleration a long time ago, and the shuttle was currently spinning like a top. In so doing, it artificially simulated the gravity on the Moon, and Dave had been easily moving about the cargo bay.

  After inspecting the rest of the rover and giving it a clean bill of health, he began to meticulously file the scorch marks off the thrusters. Soon, he felt the g-forces lessen as the pilot slowed the spin of the shuttle.

  “Mister Carter, we’re approaching the requested 55,000-mile altitude from the lunar surface. I’ll be opening the cargo bay doors in approximately five minutes.”

  “Roger that,” Dave replied, easing himself to his feet and latching his safety harness to one of the metal loops on the cargo hold’s floor.

  As the shuttle’s thrusters halted the spin and leveled the ship, Dave felt the familiar nauseous discomfort as the spin-induced gravity disappeared and he experienced the weightlessness of space. With the magnetic soles of his spacesuit now activated, he plodded very much like Frankenstein’s monster, struggling to lift his foot and place it ahead of him as he marched toward the giant spool of graphene ribbon. This ten-foot spool was three-feet wide and would easily weigh a few tons on Earth, but thanks to the lack of gravity, Dave was able to easily turn the spool on its spindle and grab the metal rod that had been melded to the end of the ribbon.

  He slowly pulled on the rod, and watched as the dull semi-transparent ribbon unfurled behind it. Dragging the end of the ribbon toward the rover, he fed the metal rod and about two feet of the attached ribbon into a slit on the top of the rover and slammed his gloved fist onto a button next to the opening. The opening immediately clamped shut, securing the end of the sheet of graphene to the rover.

  Running his fingers along the seemingly fragile ribbon, it was hard to imagine that even though the ribbon was less than the thickness of a hair, it could easily hold many tons scrambling up and down it. After all, that was the purpose of a space elevator.

  As far as the mining company was concerned, the network of space elevators would be used to help lift cargo to and from the lunar surface, so the orbiting shuttles never had to actually land. This made for a plausible explanation, but it wasn’t the truth. Nobody would ever believ
e the truth if they heard it.

  The bored voice of the pilot announced, “Evacuating the air from the cargo bay in three ... two ... one....”

  Suddenly, a horn blared in Dave’s helmet. As the air escaped from the cargo hold, the ribbon fluttered. He leaned over the rover and checked its settings. “Hey, Pilot, have you detected the infrared designator on the surface for the rover to home in on?”

  “Of course. It’s broadcasting at the designated 1,033 nanometers.”

  Dave grabbed the rover by one of its handholds and wheeled the weightless vehicle over the still-closed lower hatch of the cargo hold.

  Staring at the wide ribbon of graphene attached to the rover, his gaze followed the transparent film up to the giant spool and nodded with approval. “The rover is aligned with the spool. I’m ready here.” He took a few steps back, away from the cargo doors, as the yellow warning lights flashed through the cargo bay.

  “Roger that. Opening the lower cargo hatch in three...”

  Through the soles of his boots, Dave felt the vibration of the heavy latches unlocking, then he watched as the cargo bay doors yawned open. The rover floated above the opened doors, its programming automatically activated. With its vertical thrusters, the rover slowly lowered itself below the deck, following the infrared beacon that had been planted on the surface of the Moon.

  The ribbon unspooled faster and faster while the rover thrust itself toward the Moon’s surface.

  Just as he began to wonder about his transport, Dave felt another vibration in the shuttle and smiled.

  “Mister Carter, your transport down to the surface has docked.”

  Walking to the airlock, Dave imagined the rover in a controlled descent, speeding ever faster with the long ribbon that would form the basis of the space elevator’s scaffolding trailing behind it. He knew how much was at stake for everyone in the Moon colonies. These things he was putting in place would be so much more than a simple way of transporting stuff off the surface; they’d eventually save all of their lives.