Bill sighs disappointedly. “Yes,” he says, “and with any luck this afternoon I’ll put an arsonist back on the street because of a technicality. But next week I’ll have an innocent man freed on the same technicality, and a legal technicality will win an injunction against the landfill that’s discharging dioxin and killing all the bass in Raystown Lake. You can’t have one without the other, Brek. Justice wears a blindfold because she isn’t supposed to see who’s loading the scales.”
4
I leave Bill at his desk and return to my office. From my window, I can see the Juniata River dappled with reflections of scarlet and jasmine leaves on the trees, each a unique frame of autumn.
Bill’s right, I think. I’ve done nothing wrong defending my client on a legal technicality. In fact, I’ve done my job perfectly and the system is working exactly as designed, which is more than can be said for the system that allows someone like Piper Jackson to do weather forecasts. Which reminds me to telephone Bo at the studio.
“Hi,” he says. “I was just getting ready to call you.”
I yawn rather loudly and unexpectedly. “Wow,” I say, “sorry about that. It’s been a long morning . . . So what’s the latest from the wires? Did they ever catch that samurai warrior who attacked the northern coast of Japan? I heard he did a lot of damage.”
“Very funny,” he says.
“Sounds like he really sakéd the coast.”
Bo groans. “I’ve heard that one three times already this morning—all from women. You people can be so jealous and mean. How did Sarah’s drop-off go?”
“You people?” I protest. “Jealous and mean? The woman’s a babbling idiot. How can you stand her?”
Bo hesitates, pretending he’s trying hard to find a reason. I know he likes her even though she’s an embarrassment. Finally he says, as though helpless before an irresistible force, “Well, she does have beautiful . . . weather forecasts.”
“You’re a pig, Boaz,” I respond. He hates it when I call him by his actual first name. His parents named him Boaz after King David’s great-grandfather and the American soldier who rescued his mother’s family from the Nazis during World War II. “Sarah was fine,” I say. “She spilled formula on my suit.”
“She loves doing that,” Bo replies. “I’m on my way to Harrisburg. Harlan Hurley is being sentenced this afternoon. They want me to cover it since I broke the story.”
My secretary, Barbara, sticks her head in to tell me Alan Fleming’s on the line. I ask her to take a message. “When will you be home?”
“Six-thirty or seven unless things get crazy,” Bo answers. “I should still be able to fix dinner.”
“What are we having?”
“Any requests?”
I start writing an outline of the arguments for Alan’s summary judgment brief on a legal pad and don’t hear Bo’s question.
“Hello?” he says. “Food? Any ideas? I can tell you’re working on something.”
“What? Yeah . . . the brief in the Fleming case. Sorry, I just came up with a new genius defense. Even Bill was impressed. No, I can’t think of anything for dinner, whatever you want.”
“I hear Hurley’s skinhead buddies will be protesting at the courthouse. Did you shave your head this morning?”
“No,” I reply, “but I’m very cute bald. You’ve seen my baby pictures.”
“You know,” Bo says, baiting me because Bill and I are members of the American Civil Liberties Union, “I value free speech as much as the next guy, particularly because I’m a reporter, but rallies advocating the oppression and destruction of ethnic groups go a little too far, don’t you think? Why should they have the right to use public property to incite hatred and violence?”
I lose my train of thought and have to go back to the top of the outline.
“Really, I want to know,” Bo presses. “How can you defend them?”
This is an argument we’ve had a hundred times. “Who decides what speech is okay and what speech isn’t?” I automatically respond. “It’s fascinating how you liberal Jews suddenly get all conservative when the subject is anti-Semitism. You can’t have it both ways, Bo. Using your theory, Jews should be banned from demonstrating in favor of Israel because Israel oppresses the Palestinians. Your mother lived through the Holocaust and even she thinks anti-Semites have the right to express themselves. Maybe you should listen to her once in a while.”
“My mother’s biased,” Bo replies. “And crazy. You’re not even Jewish, but she runs around telling everybody at the synagogue that you’re a better Jew than me because you went to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services with her this year. Do you have any idea how difficult you’re making life for me?”
“So I like challah bread,” I say.
“Hurley’s not just any fringe anti-Semite with a big mouth, you know?” Bo persists. “He was the financial controller of a public school district and diverted nearly one hundred thousand dollars from their curriculum and textbook budget to his white supremacist group to produce a documentary claiming the Holocaust was a hoax.”
Here we go, all over again. I swear I’ve heard this all before. “Yes, that’s outrageous,” I say. “But he’s not going to jail for denying the Holocaust. Denying the death of six million people might be offensive, but it’s still free speech. He’s being sentenced for misappropriating school funds, period.”
“Let me finish,” Bo insists. “We keep digging up more. You’re gonna love this. Turns out that Hurley’s white supremacist group, Die Elf, also received funding from Amina Rabun before she died, and probably even afterward. Apparently her nephew or something is a member. I think his name is Ott Bowles. Did you ever run across him during the lawsuit?”
Now I see where all this is leading. It’s not just about white supremacists; it’s personal. “No, I’ve never heard of him. But you’ve got to stop right there, Bo. We sued Amina Rabun and we won. The case is over. She paid your mother restitution for the property the Rabuns stole from your mother’s family in Germany during the war. Her father and uncle were Nazis. It’s hardly a surprise that she or her nephew would be involved with Die Elf. If you turn this story about Hurley into a personal vendetta against the Rabuns, you’re going to lose all credibility as a reporter. You’ve got to let it go. Hurley was caught stealing school district money and now he’s going to jail for it. Justice has been served. End of story.”
“Hey, lighten up,” Bo responds. “I only mentioned the connection between Rabun and Die Elf because I thought you would be interested since you knew her. I have no intention of reporting any of that. I agree with you, it’s totally irrelevant.” He lowers his voice to almost a whisper. “But here’s what is relevant. Promise you won’t say anything to anybody. None of this is public yet.”
“Okay.”
“You know this Samar Mansour character, the guy Die Elf was paying to make the documentary?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Bobby just found out that Mansour dropped out of Juniata College a couple of years ago and went to Lebanon. Although Mansour was born and raised here, apparently his father was a Palestinian refugee after Israel won the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. We have sources who say Mansour trained with Hezbollah, the Islamic terrorist group. That means Hurley wasn’t only using school district funds to support Holocaust revisionism, he was supporting terrorism. That’s more than just free speech. This might be the first documented case of white supremacists joining forces with Islamic extremists.”
“Okay, that’s pretty disturbing—”
“Yeah, it is. But that’s not all. One of our sources just told us that Die Elf has a weapons cache on their compound outside Huntingdon. Assault rifles, grenade launchers, machine guns, ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel for bombs—everything a well-prepared terrorist organization needs. He said he’ll let Bobby and me film it after Hurley is locked up safe and sound today. We’re going to take them down, Brek. Not just Hurley but the entire organization. I’ll bet CNN puts me on live during pri
me time for an entire week. This is the kind of story that could get me back to New York.”
I start to worry. This is the part of Bo’s job that I hate. He is Jewish and yet he spent months undercover with his producer, Bobby Wilson, infiltrating a white supremacist group. He could have been killed—and still could be if he keeps chasing them. I want Bo to leave them alone. I’d rather have him flirting with Piper Jackson on the set of the local news every morning than risking his life doing investigative reports to get a shot with the national networks.
“Why can’t somebody else do this?” I ask. “You have no idea what kind of risks you’re taking. These people are crazy.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Bo replies. “They wouldn’t dare touch me. The FBI’s watching everything they do now.”
“But how do you know it’s not a setup? Desperate people do desperate things, Bo. And revenge has a way of drowning out rational thought, not that these are rational people to begin with. You said so yourself, they’re terrorists. They don’t care whether they get killed as long as they take a bunch of people with them. You already broke the main story. If the FBI is watching them, then you’ve got to tell the FBI and let them handle it. They’re the experts. You’re just a reporter, remember? You don’t even know how to shoot a gun.”
“Everything’s fine, Brek,” Bo says condescendingly. “I’m sorry I even brought it up.”
He always does this, belittle my concerns. It infuriates me. I say nothing.
“What’s the matter?” Bo asks.
“It’s not only your decision,” I say, trying to keep my voice down so my secretary doesn’t overhear our argument. “If you were single, things would be different and you could do whatever you want. But you have a wife and a daughter now, Bo. What about us? You’re not only putting yourself at risk, you’re putting Sarah and me at risk too.”
Bo muffles the phone. I hear someone talking to him in the background, then he comes back on. “Sorry,” he says, “the crew’s waiting in the van. I’ve got to get to Harrisburg.”
“Please be careful, okay?” I reply. “And we’re not through talking about this. I really think you should turn everything over to the FBI.”
“Okay, I’ll be careful,” he says. “And we can talk about it tonight. When do you think you’ll finish up today?”
“Around six.”
“That’s pushing it kind of close with the day care, isn’t it? Even with two salaries I don’t know how much longer we can afford the five-dollar-a-minute penalty for picking Sarah up late. At some point, they’re going to kick her out, and then what will we do?”
He was right. We were already running a $500 tab in late penalties for the year, and the director had begun warning us in increasingly blunt terms that the time-out chair for adults means “out”—for good.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say. “I’ll be there on time.”
“Okay. Bye. I love you,” he says.
I’m still nervous. “Be careful, Bo.”
“I promise.”
“Okay. I love you too. Bye.”
I hang up and look at the photograph on my shelf of Bo and me at his sister Lisa’s wedding. He’s wearing a yarmulke and looks so sweet and happy. I fell in love with Bo Wolfson for all the best reasons—because he was incredibly handsome, wonderful, sensitive, caring, a man who made me feel special, loved, and complete, and who even accepted my disability as a charming attribute rather than a cause for fear and revulsion.
But Bo’s religion made the package for me irresistible. Although I was a Catholic girl raised in a community of fundamentalist Protestants, Bo’s Jewish heritage, with its stories of struggle and heroism and promise of being chosen by God, glittered like an exotic jewel. My parents were disappointed, but I had had a lifelong quarrel with Christianity. Jesus’ teaching of turning the other cheek, which, to me, formed the bedrock of the religion, made no sense in a world filled with warfare and violence, a world filled with people like Harlan Hurley, a world that allowed an eight-year-old girl to lose her right arm.
I focus now on the yarmulke Bo wears in the photograph, but this universal symbol of Judaism suddenly recalls for me, as a Gentile, not the blessings of a chosen relationship with God but the suffering and sacrifice of five thousand years of tragedy. A chill runs up my spine as I think of Harlan Hurley and Die Elf trying to reignite the hatred of the Nazis and, perhaps, the incinerators. I imagine how it would feel to be hunted and murdered across the centuries. Am I brave enough to bear that burden? Do I want it for my daughter?
In my ignorance, I had actually assumed Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, would be a festive and gay celebration, like New Year’s Day. But it turned out to be just the opposite—brooding and ominous, the day God judges the lives we’ve lived during the previous year. The shofar blasts, calling the congregation to worship inside the synagogue, were terrifying—the voice of God condemning the entire human race. But the liturgy for the day, the Musaf Tefillah, had the effect of reaffirming my belief that God and justice are inseparable and one. Maybe by being a lawyer trained in pursuing justice I had joined the Chosen and found an inside track on redemption. At nightfall on Yom Kippur I wondered whether my name was sealed in the Book of Life or the Book of Death.
—
I RETURN TO my summary judgment brief, working through lunch and stopping only when I realize I have ten minutes to get to the day care and avoid the dreaded five-dollar-per-minute fine. When I arrive, Sarah is the last child there, gumming a Nilla Wafer into a sticky brown paste around her mouth while watching a videotape of Barney the Dinosaur. The shame of being the last mother to pick up her child almost spoils my joy at seeing her. Sarah is covered with dull red paint stains, all over her little sweatshirt and sweatpants, hands, neck, and face. She toddles toward me as fast as she can, arms outstretched, smiling and cooing. I kneel down. Miss Erin, the day-care intern from the college, grins.
“Hi, baby girl,” I say to Sarah, sweeping her up into my arm and kissing her face, inhaling the sweetness of her hair. I look up at Miss Erin. “How was she today?”
“Great,” Miss Erin says. “She’s been a very good girl.”
Miss Erin is a junior at the college and has definitely found her calling. She looks like a cartoon come to life, with two small black dots for eyes, thin sticks for arms and legs, and freckled cheeks framed by long ropes of braided orange hair. She loves little kids, and they love her.
“Sorry about the mess,” Miss Erin says. “I’m going to miss her so much. She was my favorite.”
“Are you leaving?” I ask, assuming from her response that she won’t be seeing Sarah again.
“Well, I am going home for the night,” she replies, puzzled by my question.
“But when you just said you were going to miss her and she was your favorite . . . I guess you meant for the weekend.”
Miss Erin looks at me strangely and gives Sarah a kiss. “Good-bye, sweetie,” she says. “I love you.”
Sarah gives Miss Erin a peck on the cheek.
“Thanks for taking good care of her,” I say, grabbing Sarah’s bag of nearly empty milk bottles and art projects and glancing over her activity sheet for the day. “Have a nice weekend.”
I carry Sarah out to the car, buckle her in, and slip a cassette of “Hot Tea and Bees Honey” into the tape player. As we drive away, I glance at her in the rearview mirror and ask her how her day went. She pretends to answer with cooing and babbling sounds.
We stop at a convenience store on the way home to buy milk. The parking lot is empty. An autumn breeze freshens the car when I open the door. It’s not even six-thirty yet, but it’s already dark as midnight. I unbuckle Sarah from her car seat. She reaches for my hair and I tease her by tilting away. She giggles, exposing a single tooth. Her hair falls into her eyes, dark and full of curls like her daddy’s. Carrying her across the parking lot, I’m humming the song we had been listening to on the cassette.
We enter the store and head fo
r the dairy case in the back. I have to juggle her with one arm as I pick up a half-gallon of milk. We turn and head back toward the counter through the pastry aisle. Sarah reaches out with her tiny hand and knocks a row of cupcakes onto the floor. As I stoop to pick them up, the overpowering smell of decaying mushrooms fills the air. How strange, I think. I turn to locate the source but, suddenly, find myself back at Shemaya Station, on the bench beneath the rusting steel dome. Sarah’s gone. And I’m sitting next to Luas, covered in my own blood.
5
Dead people doubt the irrevocability of their own deaths. We either don’t believe we’re dead or we try to find a way to reverse it. We learn to accept death only gradually, at our own pace and on our own terms. But this creates confusion because we extend the torn fragments of our lives into the open wound of the afterlife, grafting the two together. For sensitive souls—the souls of saints and poets who lived their lives in the knowledge that truth exists only in the spiritual world—the transition to Shemaya might seem perfectly seamless and immediate. But for the rest of us, including people like me, who placed their faith in logic and reason and what could be measured with instruments and seen with our own two eyes, the transition from life to death takes much longer. We resist, deny, and explain away our mortality at every turn. Thus, the very first thing we forget when we die is how it happened. Or, more accurately, this is the very first thing we choose not to remember, because to remember such a momentous event is to concede the inconceivable.
The next morning, which was my first morning in Shemaya, I awoke to the smell of coffee and cinnamon. These were the aromas I’d become accustomed to on Saturday mornings during my life, and as far as I was concerned this was just another Saturday morning. Bo would get up early for a jog and bring breakfast home from the bakery, slipping quietly out of the house and returning with a bag full of sticky buns and other goodies. I loved him for this. While he was gone, it was my privilege and vice to linger in bed with my eyes closed, drowsy, warm, and contented beneath the covers.
The Trial of Fallen Angels Page 3
