Eleven Days of Hell

by Yvonne Bornstein

  Through all this drama, George’s kids remained asleep, and when I would periodically look in on them, a policewoman followed me, her brows furrowed as if she believed I needed to be watched closely. Indeed, and shockingly to me, it seemed that the cops were suspicious of me. In the kitchen, they began to grill me, peppering me with rapid-fire questions such as whether George had any enemies, whether he was involved in anything shady, and so on until I could hardly think straight.

  I was so numb with shock and fear that during this questioning I realised they had told me nothing about George. I banged my fist on the counter.

  ‘I’m not going to say one more word,’ I yelled, ‘until you tell me if George is dead or not!’

  A detective looked up calmly from his notebook. ‘Yes, ma’am, he is, unfortunately,’ he said. I wanted to cry, but I was too disoriented, too numb. All I could think to ask was whether he had died instantly. They said he did. In some very small way, I was relieved to hear that.

  The detectives then returned to grilling me, focusing on what my motives might have been if I had killed George. By then, they had done a record search and seen the complaints I had lodged against Avi over the years. And in fact, Avi had still been making trouble for me recently. Even after we had split, he would call George’s house and yowl about not wanting his ‘wife’ being there. George would roll his eyes and hang up.

  But, now, the police had formed a theory: that I killed George to make it look like Avi had done it so that he would be put away. As absurd as the theory was, at about 3am the next morning, before George’s body was cold, the police went to see Avi.

  After four hours of questioning, the cops finally asked me if I wanted to call anyone. I then called one of George’s closest friends, who listened incredulously as I told him about George’s violent death. He rushed right over and pulled into the driveway as a police forensic team was sniffing around. He practically had to step over George’s body—which still lay where it fell, covered by a sheet, only his shoes visible.

  Later that morning, they took his body to the morgue. I had to go there to identify it, though I could barely recognise who it was. Lying on a slab, this once handsome man was now bloated, his skin purple. I nearly crumbled from the shock.

  As daylight filled the sky, I went back to the house, where the mother of George’s first wife had come to stay with the kids. They were never really told the truth about what befell their father until years later; up until then, they were merely told he’d had an accident. I knew I could not bear to stay there, so I went to stay with a friend. When Romy returned after the weekend, we moved back to our old apartment. For the next few weeks, I sat on my bed, my legs curled under me, and cried all day long. Often I would awaken in the middle of the night, sweat bathing my face, calling out for George. To this day, the pain lingers. It always will.

  George’s family had arranged for a funeral. Yet because the police would not release the body for three days, he was not buried the next day, as is customary under Jewish canon. Instead, they held him in the morgue so they could perform an autopsy, which is also barred by Jewish law. No one within the police department seemed to care very much about our traditions. Finally, George was laid to rest. Watching his casket being lowered into the ground, I couldn’t help but think that my life had ended as well.

  Finally, after three interminable months, George’s killers were tracked down. That’s when all the pieces of the puzzle fell together. George, it was revealed, had been stalked for some time before that night in a plot rigged by one of his employees who knew George carried a lot of cash with him on Friday nights. The three men I had seen running down the street had, several times, waited underneath our house, in a wine cellar, for George to arrive home. However, because we had usually been to dinner, we had often come home late, and the trio gave up and left before we got home.

  On the fateful Friday, George had come home alone, earlier than usual, and they struck, forcing him out of the car. One of the men pointed a double-barreled sawn-off shotgun at him. Trying to be a martyr, George reached for the gun; it went off, spraying buckshot all over his body. The killers ran away, empty-handed.

  For their bloody deed, the gang of three was convicted of manslaughter, yet they were sentenced to a mere four years—because, astonishingly, they had no previous criminal records and were set free inside two years. The employee who had organised the robbery walked away a free man. Never did any of them show any remorse.

  The trial only added humiliation to my pain. At one point, I was put on the stand and asked to locate the house on a map when the judge said with a sneer, ‘It’s not going to do much good, anyway, because women don’t know how to read maps.’ Again, as I am prone to do, I blamed myself for the tragedy. If I had just gone to be with him, as usual, on that night, we would have come home late, and the killers wouldn’t have waited. If they had confronted both of us, maybe I could have somehow fought them off, altered their plans, done something, anything. Self-incrimination, I have found, never really goes away.

  Still, once more I tried to put another body blow behind me and return to a normal life, but it struck me that normalcy might well be an impossibility. I began to think that I didn’t need to go looking for danger—it seemed that danger came looking for me. What I didn’t know was that the real danger lay just ahead on the next road.

  5

  MELBOURNE, 1983–1989

  The nights were especially long following George’s death. Getting through those interminably sleepless hours meant a lot of introspection about where I had been and where I was going. Although I had the joy of my life in my daughter, Romy, everything else had gone wrong for me. I wasn’t even thirty, and I’d been burned by divorce, the death of a loved one, and the dashing of a music career.

  Indeed, for all my restive ambition, I had no formal university education and couldn’t imagine what kind of career I might forge. Taking account of all these cons, and seeing so few pros, introspection soon morphed into alienation. At times, I felt myself sinking into a shaft of hopelessness.

  In retrospect, that I held together and did not remain closed off was due in no small part to the selfless friendship of a wonderful woman named Rhonda Kohn, whose daughter Natalie went to school with Romy. Rhonda was the closest thing I had to a girlfriend. For some reason, I got along fine with men, but women seemed to find me a bit intimidating. I heard myself called a ‘tough cookie,’ or worse, more than I liked. Yet Rhonda saw through my sometimes-willful exterior attitude to the scared little girl underneath.

  During my marriage to Avi, and more so after I’d left him, Rhonda saw that what I needed most of all was a true friend. She was more than that. She was my ballast. Whenever she saw that far-off look in my eyes, she brought me back. Never did she lecture me to stop wallowing in self-pity. Instead, she merely made me a part of life again, able to enjoy the simple things that are the most rewarding.

  This usually took the form of her bringing over Natalie to play with Romy. The two little girls would sit themselves down at the dining room table pretending their storybooks were menus. They would tell me to play waitress and take their ‘orders,’ which could be ‘elephant soup’ or ‘horse’s legs.’ Something as purely innocent as that would redirect my emotions.

  At more serious moments, Rhonda would sit with me for hours, reassuring me after George’s death that I was not to blame. She would not leave if she thought I’d backslide. It’s now three decades since we met and hers is still the best shoulder on which I can lean.

  Still, the essence of survival lies inside of us. The strength is there to overcome any obstacle, but only if we tap into our reserves of grit, pluck, desire, whatever it is. I found that I could kick myself in the behind much harder in times of adversity than success.

  So I pulled myself out of bed and dared myself to get back to taking risks.

  On a small scale to be sure, but still taking a risk, I borrowed money using my house as collateral and purchased a couple of
small rundown houses. I renovated them and put them up for sale. Neck-deep in debt, I was able to sell them and turn a nice little profit. At least financially, I was again standing on my feet.

  As for meeting another man, that would take more than an order of horse’s legs and grit. It took time just to even consider dating again. My mindset was, why be burned again? It stayed set for four years—not that I was celibate. To be sure, I wasn’t emulating Mother Teresa. I dated a few guys, but never would have let myself fall head over heels.

  In 1986, another friend kept pushing me to meet a guy. Jewish, a recent widower. A hunk, she said. Although I did think a mutual rebounding from tragedy was an inducement, it took another few weeks for me to give in to a blind date. I arranged for him to come to my house for coffee, and in walked an alarmingly huge fellow, six foot four, two hundred pounds, his face obscured by oversized horn-rimmed glasses and a very long beard. Oh, great, I thought, I’m being fixed up with Rasputin.

  His name was Daniel Weinstock. At thirty-eight, he was seven years older than me. I learned he was a successful businessman, a computer software programmer specialising in fleet management transport. His company, National Computer Services, wrote the software that allowed big businesses to coordinate transportation across Australia. His wife, Freda, died of cancer barely three months before, leaving two sons, ages ten and six, and he was looking to quickly remarry.

  I learned all this because, sitting in a chair in my living room for four hours, all he did was talk about himself. I could have been a piece of furniture. Not that he wasn’t intriguing, or attractive if you could see through the beard, but it was all about him. When he left, I told myself that if I ever saw this Mr Weinstock again, it would be much too soon. Things are never that cut and dried in matters of the heart. Danny was taking his two boys, Ben and Jonathan, away on vacation the following week, and I was surprised when he called me from the little hick town where they were staying. He was a totally different Mr Weinstock. Apparently not feeling the need to impress me, he seemed genuinely interested in me. A couple of days later, he sent me an unbelievably romantic love letter followed the next day by a dozen long-stemmed red roses.

  Of course, George had won me with roses, and I reacted the same way this time. When Danny arrived back, with his beard shorn and displaying the handsome features I’d imagined, we became an item. He became obsessed with marrying me. While I didn’t think I could love him the way I had George, he wore down my resistance to falling in love again. I was able to rebuff two proposals, but when he took me to a restaurant and actually kneeled down in front of me in the middle of a full dining room, I said yes. I had but one condition.

  ‘Danny, I’ll marry you,’ I said, ‘but only if you get up because I’m dying of embarrassment.’

  A huge cheer arose from the patrons in the restaurant.

  He gave me a ring that night and asked me to move into his house pending our marriage. The house, in a beachside suburb called Brighton, was splendid enough, a bit old and run down but comfortable nonetheless. Danny had worked hard to establish a good home, and the house stood as a testament to his success. But it had something I could not live with—a ghost. Call me melodramatic, but the first time I set foot in the place, I felt the spirit of his late wife, Freda, in every room. Danny suggested renovating it but I reiterated my unease. I didn’t want to be ungrateful, but I simply didn’t want to share my house with another Mrs Weinstock.

  So we decided this was the time for both of us to make a new beginning. Danny put the house up for sale, and I put some of my own money into buying a spanking-new five-bedroom home in another suburb, Elsternwick. We moved in just after the new year of 1987, and on March 28, we tied the knot at the South Caulfield Synagogue before eighty guests, including my parents Billie and Wally who came in from Perth, soon to move to Melbourne themselves. What I recall most clearly about that day, other than how hot and stifling it was in that synagogue, was the way Danny’s eyes lit up when I strode in wearing a vintage Charleston lace dress and apricot-colored sash. I did, however, nearly turn solemnity into slapstick comedy when the heat got me under the chupa and I nearly fainted dead away.

  We partied and danced the hora until the wee hours at a nearby restaurant called Goldman’s, then honeymooned at Surfer’s Paradise in Queensland. When we came back home, Danny and I palpably believed we had nothing but good fortune waiting for us in the future.

  For me, a new life meant two things, which both of us wanted. First was me getting pregnant. Second was me working with him in business. I felt this was a perfect mix of our life’s interests. I wanted another child, but I had no intention of being an old-fashioned housebound mum. Danny was an extremely astute businessman, having prefigured the coming tidal wave of computer-related industries in the early and mid-1980s. Under his steady hand, National Computer Services had developed into a profitable, if not enormously lucrative concern. In me, he understood that he had a savvy and strong woman eager to learn.

  Danny began teaching me the ropes of the business and said I was the best student he had ever had. Soon, I was writing those tricky software programs, and by the end of 1987 I elevated myself to the position of co-director with him. The money was steady and rewarding. But we both wanted more. Much more.

  I think Danny got from me a sense of business wanderlust. This was a logical extension of my risk-taking impulses. I told him we could stand pat and make a nice living, or we could push the boundaries and perhaps break the bank. And so we began looking around at high-risk capital ventures.

  As it happened, Danny and I didn’t have to put in any legwork to expand the Weinstock brand name onto a global stage. The vehicle for doing that literally walked right into our office.

  In the winter of 1988, a mysterious and nervy stranger named Matthew Hurd ambled unannounced through the door of National Computer Services and began pitching a ‘can’t-miss’ business proposition. Normally, we would have been wary of someone coming in off the street like this, figuring he was either a huckster or a leech. However, I became intrigued with the guy’s chutzpah and with his spiel about the lucrative potential of something called barter trade.

  An Australian with strong community ties, Hurd was forty-eight, short and stumpy, and though he fairly burned with ambition and ideas, he had a soothing, unassuming manner that went a long way towards easing our minds about this murky business. Matthew seemed eminently credible. He explained that he had gone to Moscow during the 1980 Olympics and had seen how some daring Western businessmen had made a fortune doing business with Iron Curtain and Third World countries.

  The game, as Matthew explained it, worked like an endless carousel ride that began and ended in Russia, where quality consumer goods are so meager that black-market merchants would be willing and able to pillage the country’s natural resources to get their hands on them. That set off a chain reaction of movement. Other countries, large and small, industrial or Third World, Asian or East European, craved those resources—items like copper, tin, aluminium, steel, even fertiliser—and they would buy those Russian goods, sight-unseen, for obscene amounts of money. And we, as the barter trade agents, would make a killing.

  What would the Russians want from these deals? Here’s the beautiful part. They wanted not one cent. All they wanted were those hard-to-come-by goods—basic essentials such as shoes, clothing, and food; high-tech electronics items like computers and peripherals, televisions, stereos, and copying machines; and sturdy vehicles like automobiles and trucks. With the money we would rake in from the sale of their goods, we’d buy these items wholesale in the Western parts of the world and drop-ship them back to our partners in Russia. The amount of money that accrued from these global deals could stretch into the millions, Matthew said, if one had the stomach to pursue it, not merely half-heartedly but with a commitment to people who knew the game inside out. People like him, for one.

  ‘Put yourself in my hands,’ he said, ‘and it’ll be like writing whatever number you want on a
blank cheque.’ It was a statement that would, in time, prove to be wickedly ironic.

  Our first question was whether such trading with Iron Curtain countries was entirely legal. As Matthew explained it, the answer was yes, no, and maybe. Within the Soviet Union, it was perfectly legal, then and now. However, in the West, barter trade lies in a gray area, caught in a bind between free trade and private profiteering, the latter of which is acceptable only if the goods being marketed can in any way be construed as having any non-military use—including weapons or high-tech items such as encryption devices and some software applications. In Australia, for instance, such commerce in the late 1980s was enjoined by the Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), which was based in Paris and had been used for over a decade as a US tool to prevent worldwide distribution of encryption.

  (COCOM was officially dissolved in 1994, but many of the rules today remain intact under the Wassenaar [The Hague] Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies.) In fact, as you will see, Danny and I would run afoul of COCOM, nearly ruining one particularly lucrative deal.

  Moreover, Western governments for political and propagandistic reasons implicitly frowned upon carrying on freelance commerce with the Iron Curtain countries. Those concerns, however, hardly resonated with capitalism-driven Western businessmen. Far more important, barter trade was not a business for the faint of heart. For one thing, because it was done in the shadows, unregulated by any national or international trade agency, agreements and contracts were only as good as the word of your trading partners—who, working within a tapestry of subcontracted middlemen, you rarely ever saw and who worked exclusively on handshake deals. You had to hope no one turned out to be a crook looking to rip you off or, worse, try to hold you up. If they did, deals could collapse, and hundreds of thousands of dollars could be lost.