Lieberman's Law

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “You know why I’m not beating you, William?” his father had asked.

  Berk had said “no” softly as he sat next to his father in their shit-brown Mustang.

  “Because you stole from a Jew lady,” he said. “I don’t want you stealing. I don’t want you breaking the law, but if you got to do it, do it from a nigger or a kike or any colored bastard who should never been in this country in the first place.”

  Berk nodded and listened. He had heard it before. The United States had been ruined by people who didn’t belong here, colored people. Berk’s father could be colorful and inconsistent on the subject for. hours. Recent immigrants from Europe, any country in Europe as long as they weren’t communists or Jews, were fine. White. Always dealt with him straight enough. Berk’s mother knew enough to mind her business when this subject came up. She went to watch television or call her sister when Berk’s father got on the subject.

  Meanwhile, Berk did some juvenile time, not much, for breaking into a coffee shop at two in the morning. He and his buddy had found thirty-six dollars and some change and loaded up a bag of getting-stale donuts. They were barely out of the broken window when the police picked them up.

  When Berk got out, he played his father’s boy, did reasonably well at school, announced that he, like two of his brothers, wanted to be a firefighter. While he prepared himself for the job, with the help of his father and his skeptical brothers, he was very selective about the crimes he committed at night, well-spaced robberies of women alone on dark streets. He worked alone then and always wore a ski mask.

  He had actually apprenticed as a firefighter in Chicago when he made it through high school. His father had some clout and it was clear that Berk had already been well prepared by his family. He had been assigned to the same station as his brother James W. Berk, Jr.

  One night he had gotten back to the station after a massive blaze at a building on the South Side where his unit had been sent as backup. A whole block was on fire. Stores. Flames threatening to jump the street. Looters running right past the firemen and the few cops and grabbing what they could.

  Berk, covered in dirt and smoke, smelling like death, had called his father, woke him from a sound sleep and said, “They shot at us. They fuckin’ shot at us. The niggers shot at us. Jimmy has a bullet in his foot. We’re puttin’ out their fire and they’re shootin’. And this guy on the sidewalk with a bullhorn and one of those velvet hats on his head, black son-of-a-bitch is telling the people to stop us, to let the Jew stores burn. A bullet came this fuckin’ close to my head. For what? To protect a bunch of Jew and Korean stores?”

  “To pick up a good paycheck, make a living, and retire young,” his father had answered. “Which hospital did they take Jimmy to?”

  Berk had told him, hung up, quit the department, teamed up with four friends and convinced them to shave their heads and put on leather jackets after he read about skinheads in England. Skinheads were pure white and took no shit. Their group had grown. They started as vandals, joined up once in a while with some neo-Nazi groups and a handful of Klan guys for joint marches and rallies, but Berk soon realized that he was bigger, smarter, stronger, and a better speaker than any of those guys, and by the time he realized it, he had more than two dozen young men who had joined him. And there were girls. He stayed away from the ones who wanted to be hurt. He didn’t want that kind of trouble. There were plenty of girls who were happy with what he gave them. He stayed nice to the Klan and the neo-Nazis who gave him a little money. They didn’t seem to have all that much, though they claimed rich backers out of state. One of the television station commentators, an old fart, had given Berk’s group a name, the Chicago Skinhead Hate Mongers. Berk liked it. It sounded like a hockey team. Eventually, they became known simply as the Mongers.

  When something else wasn’t going on, Berk’s Mongers wore baseball caps and delivered pizzas or dished out pieces of fried chicken.

  One night on television, Berk had seen the nigger in the velvet hat, the one with the bullhorn who had egged on the crowd at the fire, the one who had gotten his brother Jimmy shot. The nigger’s name was Martin Abdul. Berk knew the name. Abdul had risen fast, started a Muslim church, pulled in big bucks, built a big mosque, appeared on talk shows with Jesse Jackson. Martin Abdul was one dangerous nigger, but a smart one. He had big bucks.

  Ever since Mr. Grits had shown up, Berk’s financial prospects had risen considerably. He had first been contacted by Mr. Grits the night after he had spoken to the Mongers, their girls and some people, many of them older, some of whom he knew were friends of his family, in the park not two blocks from where he had grown up. The police were there. They were always there. They always found out, showed up, ready to break up the crowd if they got the call from a sergeant watching from a car that it was getting too big or surly. They could always stop him for lack of a public permit, but it was easier to let him speak, even come close to inciting riot, though there was no one within miles of the neighborhood whose family wasn’t Irish, Polish, German, or British. There was a family of Indians who ran a 7-11 on Oakton, but they weren’t worth the trouble of bothering. Not yet anyway.

  Berk had spoken loudly to cheers: two of his brothers in the audience including Jimmy, Jr., people saying, “He’s right,” laughter at his jokes. When he finished, he went with two of his people to an all-night place on Touhy where the waitress and manager weren’t happy to see them, but treated them with polite blandness.

  Three young men had approached Berk’s group at a table, said they wanted to join. Berk welcomed them. So did the others. One said he’d probably lose his job clerking at a shoe store when he shaved his head but he wanted to be a Monger. Berk said he could get him other work.

  That was when it happened. The waitress, a skinny rag in a wrinkled uniform with heavy bags under her eyes had come to the table and said, “One of you Berk?”

  “Yeah,” Berk had said.

  “Phone,” the waitress had said and then headed for the kitchen and their meager orders. She didn’t expect much of a tip and was fairly sure they’d hang around until the place closed. She shuffled away and Berk went to the front of the coffee shop where one of the two pay phones was off the hook resting on the metal platform.

  “Berk?” asked the man with a smile in his voice and the joy of a car salesman.

  “Yeah.”

  “Heard you talk tonight,” said the man who would never give his name but because of a slight Southern accent, Berk would always think of as Mr. Grits. “Son, you were good. Right up there with the best.”

  “Thanks,” Berk said, going over the faces of the people who had been in the crowd, not being able to put one of those faces to this voice. Berk didn’t ask how the man had found him, gotten the phone number. He knew the man must have followed him and must be calling from not very far away.

  “You should be much bigger,” said Mr. Grits. “Doin’ much bigger things. More doing, less talking. We’ve been talking about the niggers, the Jews, the Chinks, the Indians for more than a hundred and twenty years. It’s time for doing.”

  “Yeah?” said Berk not sure if he might be talking to a cop or even the FBI.

  “I can get you cheap briefcases filled with unmarked money,” said Mr. Grits. “Not Washingtons wrapped in bank paper and lined up in neat lines so it looks like a lot but turns out to be a few thousand. I’m talking about big money for you, personally. Handle it the way you want. Just get a job done for us, a job that will fit quite nice with what I heard in the park tonight.”

  “What jobs? How do I get the money?”

  Mr. Grits had hung up. Berk had asked the night manager behind the counter, an older male duplicate of the waitress, if he had seen anyone come in and look at or use the phones. The man shrugged, said he’d gone to the can, thought maybe he had seen a man in a suit, wasn’t sure.

  Mr. Grits returned three days later. Berk had run three miles and went back to his apartment, his sweatshirt soaked. Pinned to the door was a
note. The note said, “Bring this note with you. Go down to your mailbox. Take out the unstamped letter. Bring this note and the letter outside. When you finish reading the letter, burn it and this note right out on the street next to the fire hydrant.”

  Berk had done as the note asked, feeling that the man he now called Mr. Grits was probably some kind of nut, but there had been cash in the envelope, a lot of cash. There was also a note asking him if he had thought about the call he had received and telling him he could keep the money no matter what.

  Berk had walked outside, held up the letter and the note so that someone watching could see and burned them both. Mr. Grits was really watching out for his own ass. Berk decided to keep a couple of sheets of paper and some envelopes like the one he had just burned. If he got more messages from Mr. Grits, he would burn the fakes and pocket the real notes which might come in handy.

  Berk visited his mother who was pushing seventy and working part-time at the Christian Resale Shop on Devon where the few dollars that were made went to the inner-city needy. Mrs. Berk didn’t care if the needy were black, white, Jew, or Hindu. She had read the words of Jesus herself and heard Father Brian every week since before the boys were born. She had held her peace, kept to herself, and gone to work for the Resale Shop three weeks after her husband died in a parking garage fire.

  Berk rarely visited his mother. She made him uncomfortable and he had the clear feeling that she was not always happy to see her youngest son. He always dressed neatly when he visited her and even took the earring out, but his shaven head and occasional pictures of him on television kept him from carrying off the role of peace-loving, dutiful Christian son.

  Berk visited his mother that day, though. She was cordial, made him coffee, cut him a slice of cake, told him about his brothers and their families, and listened to him tell a few lies about what he was doing. Then, before he left and without his mother knowing, he hid the money from Mr. Grits inside the broken slat of wood at the back of his old closet. He had already put a few dollars there. He would put a lot more in that closet. Berk had plans beyond making speeches and getting into fights.

  Then Berk waited, talking, marching, even doing a local television talk show and acting calm, intelligent, and highly and sincerely bigoted, insisting that his group never started violence, that they simply responded to it when someone tried to abridge their freedom to speak publicly, that it was television that had named him and his friends the Chicago Skinhead Hate Mongers. As far as the group was concerned, they were just friends who shared his ideas and wanted to protect the United States. He talked about the failure of immigration laws, the government’s appeasement of lawbreakers if they were minorities—Mexicans, Haitians, Cubans, Chinese.

  “They couldn’t do anything about it if they even wanted to,” he had said on one show. “The law is too screwed up. There is no two-party system, just people out to get votes from foreigners so they can keep their jobs and their blood money. My grandparents came here legally. It should have stayed that way. Now, it’s too late. It’s people like us who have to take care of the problem.”

  About a third of the audience, not counting his own people, had applauded. About half had booed and jeered, and the white-haired host had shaken her head at his statements.

  And then he heard from Mr. Grits again. Little kid had stopped him on the street while he was running one morning handed him an envelope, and ran away. Berk had opened the envelope, found more money and a note saying, “Public phone on the right about half a block. Tear this up now into two pieces and dump it in the trash can on your left.”

  Berk had done what he was told. He was beginning to understand Mr. Grits. The phone rang when he was no more than three feet from it. While he was on the phone, out of sight of the trash can, he was sure someone who worked for Mr. Grits was already picking up the torn note.

  “Are you ready to talk seriously?” Mr. Grits said, as if this were the most beautiful day the world had yet experienced. “Or do I hang up and hope you make good use of the money you have been blessed with?”

  “We talk.”

  “Good,” said Mr. Grits. “There is a booth at the Burger King half a block away. Go there. Go to the toilet. Take your pants down. Lock the door. When no one else is in the room, we’ll talk. If you try to see me, perhaps even succeed in seeing me, you’ll never hear from me again. There will, however, come a time soon, when you will have accepted so much money from us that the option of ceasing our negotiations will be void.”

  Mr. Grits hung up. Berk went to the toilet in the Burger King and talked to Mr. Grits in person though all he could see of the man were his neatly pressed tan slacks, brown socks, and expensive brown walking shoes.

  The plan was a bit complex, but Berk understood. He would follow the plan and, in return, would receive a great deal of money and a substantial bonus when the job was done.

  “After all, Mr. Grits said with a slight laugh, we don’t expect you to plan the details of and execute the murder of perhaps several dozen people without reasonable compensation.”

  And the money had come. Berk had planned and rethought his life. When he finished exercising that morning, Berk would practice the speech he planned to deliver that night to his followers. They would think he was making it up standing right up there at the front of the room, but he wrote it out longhand and memorized it, practiced in front of his mirror like Hitler, checked the time so he would not lose the real dummies who would be sitting there.

  Berk thought he heard rain. That was fine with him. He would do his sit-ups and run another mile in the rain, feeling his T-shirt cling to and slap against his body. He’d laugh as he ran and people would get out of his way or cross the street if they saw him. He would run till he was exhausted and then go to Fran’s apartment, wake her up, and screw her dripping wet, a little cold, tired. Fran’s roommates would mind their business.

  It would be a perfect morning.

  Less than a year earlier, Alan Kearney looked like a young man. Dark groomed hair, strong chin, straight nose, Irish green eyes. Youth had left him fast after his ex-partner had been killed. Shepard had died cursing Kearney for seducing his wife.

  Kearney, who had been headed for the top, including a well-placed society wife and a long-term move up to Commissioner, had gone empty. He was still Captain of Detectives and head of the brown brick police station on North Broadway. He did his job, put in the hours, praised, complained, pushed, and assigned, but Lieberman knew the ambition, the real fire, was out. Kearney might even marry yet. Every Irish cop, including Bill Hanrahan, had a woman for him, a cousin, a friend, a sister. Once in a while Kearney tried, but all the women reported that his idea of a good time was going to a bar, looking at his glass, and listening without saying much. It was even rumored that Kearney had made it to bed with Michael Horrigan’s sister, Eva. The rumor was never confirmed and their single date never repeated.

  At Bess’s urging, Lieberman had once invited Kearney to the house for a Shabbat dinner. To his surprise, Kearney had accepted. That was when Lisa was home, separated from her husband. There had been no thought of matchmaking, at least on Lieberman’s part, but Bess had been disappointed that Lisa and Kearney had little to say to each other and had left shortly after dinner. They paused only to say goodnight to Melisa and Barry, who had decided that Alan Kearney, their grandpa’s boss, looked like a real policeman.

  Now Kearney stood in the day room of the stone-walled Clark Street Station with very little day coming in through the narrow windows. The room was often used for interrogations. It looked like rain was coming. The sound of thunder grumbled far in the distance.

  He stood in front of a white board, a red marker in his hand, and looked around the room. The whole squad of eight men and two women was present, plus a thin, dark man who sat at a scratched table. Kearney did not introduce him. No one looked at him or said anything.

  “Lorber, you charge Gonzalez today by noon or he walks,” said Kearney. “You got enough to c
harge?” Kearney ticked off something with his marker on the yellow, lined pad before him on the table.

  Lorber, who had once been a department weight-lifting champ, had kept in shape, but not the shape he had been in. Time had made the weights heavier. He was still strong enough to lift most perps off the ground and batter them against a wall, till they’d hear Chinese gongs, but station-house banter had Bill Hanrahan six to three if the two of them ever had to stand it out. Hanrahan had stopped drinking and held most of his strength as a gift of heredity rather than practice as Lorber had. Lorber was a station house grouse.

  “I’m talking to a lawyer downtown today,” said Lorber, taking a drink from his Styrofoam coffee cup. “I think we’ve got enough for illegal possession, resisting and …”

  “… but not for murder,” Kearney finished.

  Lorber shrugged.

  “We’ve got three Jewish synagogues desecrated in this district,” Kearney went on. “And a fourth in Albany Park.”

  “And a fifth in Skokie,” added Lieberman, whose hands were folded in his lap.

  “And a fifth in Skokie,” Kearney amended. “What do we have?”

  “What we don’t have is more to the point,” said Lieberman. “The FBI is taking prints. Most of them are matching congregants who don’t like being printed. It’s taking time. Perps may have worn gloves. We’re working with the Skokie police. I stopped at B’nai Zion. Torn apart. The rabbi is old, the congregants are few and old. Rabbi Zechel was crying.”

  Kearney nodded and passed around a stack of color photographs, each one marked on the back with the name of the desecrated synagogue where it was taken.

  The squad looked over the photographs slowly and passed them along. The man none of them recognized looked especially closely at each photo before passing it on. Lieberman and Hanrahan did not look. They had seen them all, been in all of the desecrated synagogues.

  “What’s this?” asked Harley Buel, putting on his glasses.