The Sunset Gang

by Warren Adler

  "Christ, do you stink," his friend told him when he had put on the disguise for the eleventh time.

  He lifted an arm and stuck his nose into the armpit.

  "Now it's more authentic."

  "Pheww."

  Oddly, he came to look forward to this nightly round. There was something mystical in being able to walk the streets as another person, an old Jew, and he began to actually look forward to the stares, the ridicule, the abuse of the children. He would stare back at them, smiling thinly, hoping they would see the fire in his eyes and interpret it as some curse, some evil spell that he was transmitting and from which they would suffer. I feel your pain, old man, he would tell himself on those occasions when he caught his reflection in the glass of a store window.

  As he walked, he maintained his alertness, although he wondered if it stemmed from the fear of the old Jew he had created or the stalking cop that lingered within. He deliberately walked into dark and lonely places, in alleys, down deserted side streets, behind tenements and stores, courting attack. The sound of footsteps made his heart beat joyously, as his body braced for an impending blow. "Go on, you bastard," he would mumble. "Make your move."

  Finally someone did make a move. It was remarkable that he had been able to walk in this neighborhood as long as he had, a defenseless old Jew.

  The footsteps behind him were muted. The person who stalked him obviously was wearing sneakers. The sounds stopped when he stopped, started again when he moved. He gripped the club under his coat and walked to the darker side of the street, pausing in the entrance of an alley, where he picked up the top of a garbage can and pretended to be peeking inside. Listening, he felt the person getting closer, the breathing audible. He felt the tension, then heard the sound of the body's catapulting movement as hands reached out to clutch at his throat. He felt himself being pushed deeper into the alley, letting it happen, feeling the sharp pain of the initial attack. His back crashed against a wall and he caught his first glimpse of the assailant, a young man in his twenties, smooth skin, blond, an Irish face. He saw the glint of the knife as it flashed, then hung in the air just below his chin. He was calm, felt no fear, leveling his eyes on the face of the young man, his thin Irish lips snarling.

  "The gelt, kike."

  "Don't kill me," Bernie squeaked.

  "Da gelt, kike," the young man hissed. "You didn't have enough last time, dummy." He smiled.

  Sure, Bernie thought, all bearded Jews look alike.

  "I god da gelt, sonny," Bernie squeaked, feigning fear and holding up his hands, then lowering them, lifting his knee with all his power and catching the young man in the groin, watching him drop, the knife falling to the cement. He dragged the young man by the hair along the length of the alley, stopping in the stair well in the rear of the tenement, and then pushed the young man in front of him until he could see the frightened face clearly in the light. The enclosure smelled of urine and garbage. Clutching the man's windpipe, he waved the knife in front of his face, feeling the joy and power of it.

  "You vant my gelt, sonny?" he said, his voice still squeaking. He waved the knife in front of the young man's nose. The young man's throat hacked, the phlegm rose and was ejaculated into Bernie's false beard, which made his fingers tighten on the windpipe. I could crush this in five seconds, he thought, feeling the strength of his hands. He felt himself giggle, then relax as he roughly turned the boy around and threw cuffs around his wrists, then jabbed him in the small of the back and, when he fell, turned him over, tied his ankles, and shoved a gag into his mouth. The young man was obviously frightened now, the arrogance had faded from his eyes, and Bernie smiled as he looked down at the Irish face in the half-light.

  "You are a lucky mick to find this old Jew," Bernie said, forgetting for a moment to play his role, then remembering. "You vont I should make you Jewish?"

  He would never understand how the idea had popped into his head, only that suddenly it was there, along with the knife that flashed in his hands and he was smiling, enjoying the anguish in the young man's face. He bent down on one knee and tugged at the man's belt, ripping the zipper as he opened the fly, then rolling the man's pants to his knees, looking downward in the faint light at the man's exposed genitals, retracted in fear. The young man whimpered as Bernie waved the knife in front of him, embellishing his own sense of cruelty, watching the tears fill the young man's eyes and hearing the whimpers in his chest.

  "I'm gonna make you a Jew, you dirty miserable mick bastard," Bernie hissed, feeling the hurt of his whole life assail him with the force of a single blow, feeling the hatred surge in his body as he gripped the handle of the knife and held it in front of the young man's face. The blue eyes blinked and the tears of terror flowed over the lids as the eyes closed tightly and the head rolled in anguish. He reached downward for the retracted penis, the foreskin drawn over the tip, the flesh felt cold as ice. The hand that held the knife shook as he tried to brace his own body to keep his hand steady. The point of the knife moved downward and the young, man's body began to shiver uncontrollably so that with his shaking hand and the shivering body, he knew it would be impossible to do the operation. Perhaps it was the transmission to himself of the young man's fear, which he felt now, but he was suddenly disgusted with himself for having entertained the idea. He stood up, the rage gone, breathing deeply, hearing the knife clatter to the ground as he backed out of the urine-smelling stair well into the street, where he tried to relieve his anguish and the horror of his own aborted act with great gulps of the night air.

  Later he threw the outfit and the beard down the incinerator of his apartment building.

  In recalling that incident, he could illustrate to himself how it was possible for a put-upon people like the Jews to erupt in violence.

  "Don't push us too hard," he told his fellow cops after this incident, feeling for the moment more mature and tolerant.

  When Hitler rose to power in Germany and began publicly persecuting Jews and sending them to concentration camps, Bernie Bromberg once again received absolute confirmation of his philosophy that "all goyim hate Jews." The evidence was convincing, appalling, even to his Irish Colleagues.

  "Listen," a lieutenant named Cassidy said to him. He was thin-skinned and red-faced, the veins crawling over his big nose like a network of rivers. "It's human to be prejudiced. But Jeez, this Hitler guy is going too far."

  "Yeah," Bernie responded, thinking to himself that this big mick would be the first in line if a home-grown-variety dictator came to power.

  He had tried to enlist, but was turned down because of flat feet and a bad back. Oddly, the war had had a negative effect on his career. As soon as the men returned from the war, many of them younger than himself, they were given preference for the better jobs within the department, a condition that only fed his distrust of his superiors.

  "Now they don't have to make up excuses. They apologize and tell me that they got to give preference to veterans. I say bullshit to that. It's the same as before."

  Finally, even Mildred began to agree with him. What other reason could there be for her Bernie to have remained a patrolman all these years?

  "I was right, Mildred," he would say emphatically, knowing that he had her agreement.

  "Maybe someday it'll get better."

  "Never."

  Bernie Bromberg believed this most emphatically in his soul, even when Israel was first created by the United Nations.

  "The bastards won't let 'em live," he said to his confused police colleagues who observed the international situation with half an ear. It was, of course, after those atrocity pictures had appeared and people had stared at them in disbelief.

  "The goyim secretly like it," Bernie Bromberg had observed.

  And when all of the Arab states attacked the young state of Israel right after the United Nations decree, he had shrugged.

  "Who didn't know that was coming?"

  Yet Israel survived that onslaught and the one in 1956, but it wasn't until the S
ix Day War that even Bernie Bromberg wavered in his belief that the Jews were put on the earth to be kicked around by the goyim. He reveled in the jokes his fellow cops were telling about the Arabs and their laughable military prowess and, for a brief time, enjoyed the respect he had found.

  "You people are great fighters," the boys at the precinct house would say, filling him with pride as he thought how confusing it must be to them. After all, he was an American, he told himself, not an Israeli, although he only half-believed that. He was a Jew. That's the way the goyim felt about it and that's the way he felt about it.

  "If you were forced to make a choice between the United States and Israel, which country would you fight for?" he had been asked one day by his partner as they sat at a lunch counter eating cheese sandwiches. He had been asked that question many times.

  "I am an American," he said.

  "You'd fight against your own kind?"

  "I'm an American," he said, and swallowed hard, wondering if he would really make that kind of choice.

  For a while at least, he could mark the Six Day War as a turning point in the way he, personally, was treated by his fellow cops. By then he had accepted his fate and was determined to sit out his pension. He had grown so accustomed to the code words and subterfuges that he imagined were standard practice that it hardly bothered him as much when someone called him a white Jew or talked about "you people" or "your kind." Even "Jew bastard" didn't inflame him any more, and he imagined that terms like "sheeny, yid, kike, hebe" had become outdated since he heard them less and less often. But, despite the pride and his new-found respect, he distrusted it in his heart.

  "It's only temporary," he said. His children were grown by that time and his obstinate belief in the inevitability of Jewish persecution and the avowed goal of the goyim to kill all the Jews became an object of ridicule.

  "You're paranoid," his son would say. "That kind of thinking is yesterday's dishwater."

  "Wait," Bernie would tell him.

  "You sound like a Jewish mother's joke."

  "You'll see."

  He had already bought his condominium at Sunset Village before the day of his retirement and Mildred had gone by herself for two weeks to take care of the furnishing and preparing of the place for his arrival. There was a brief retirement ceremony at the precinct. The captain made a speech and a little joke, not without its Jewish references. Everybody laughed politely and he gathered up things in his locker and left the precinct house after shaking hands all around. Some of the fellows with whom he had served had tears in their eyes, but he wondered if they were crying for him or for themselves.

  In Sunset Village, he rarely saw anyone who wasn't Jewish, and to find validation of his theories about Jewish destruction he read the newspapers avidly, looking for further evidence of what he believed. It was everywhere, it seemed to him, and growing worse. The Soviet Union was now actively persecuting Jews.

  "I could have told those damned Jewish Reds back in the thirties," he would say to all who would listen. And, always, there would be confirmation in the response. He saw evidence of anti-Semitism everywhere. When the King of Jordan came to Washington, and the President entertained him, he was certain that some deal would be struck to the disadvantage of the Jews. Even when a top official of Israel was being entertained at the White House, he would remark:

  "They're buttering him up for the kill."

  But the apogee of his confirmation came in 1973. He could not believe what he was hearing at first, then he calmly accepted what had happened as absolute evidence of the further proof of his concept.

  "I can't believe it's happening," people would say during those traumatic weeks. The atmosphere in Sunset Village was gloomy. Nobody smiled. Everybody seemed depressed, as if the Arabs would be attacking Sunset Village shortly and this were the calm before the storm.

  "What do you mean you can't believe it?" Bernie Bromberg would say.

  "You'd think that after all we've been through they'd leave us alone."

  "Why should they do that?" he would say with some authority, while the others around him would shrug in agreement.

  "Then what's the solution?" someone would ask.

  He had by then decided that the only solution was the one he had employed on the young thug who had beat up the old Jew in Greenwich Village many years ago. He thought often about this incident, but in his mind the act of circumcision actually occurred. In the fantasy of the act, there was no longer any revulsion or regret.

  "I was a tough New York cop," he told his new cronies when they sat around the pool or in the clubhouse playing cards. "And believe me, force is the only language they understand."

  "So what's the solution?"

  "Action," he said smugly, feeling his pulse quicken and enjoying his role as spokesman.

  "Like the Jewish Defense League?" someone asked.

  "Exactly."

  "They're not too radical?"

  "Not radical enough," Bernie said. He could feel a wave of admiration wash over him.

  "Somebody should start a chapter here," someone said.

  Bernie would have been hard put to recount how it actually came about, but soon after the Arab oil embargo, a unit had been formed and he had been elected head of it. Someone had written to Rabbi Kahane, the national director of the JDL, and he had come down and spoken to them. Bernie Bromberg had made the inroductions, and his name was mentioned in the Sunset Village paper, giving him for the first time in his life a great sense of pride and purpose. When he walked through the neatly clipped paths, people seemed to notice who he was, smiling in greeting, and he was never without his "Never Again" button.

  Thirty men, all in their early to middle seventies, had become members of Bernie Bromberg's chapter of the Jewish Defense League. They met weekly in one of the all-purpose rooms in the clubhouse and Bernie would preside and read them clippings from the newspapers to illustrate how terrible the new persecution was becoming, how the Soviets were stepping up their harassment of Jews and how the Americans and the rest of the world were selling out Israel.

  Someone had even made a crude sign, which was thumbtacked to the wall and read: "Secret Session. Members Only." Most of the other people in Sunset Village snickered when they passed the meeting room.

  "This is a Jewish CIA?" a kibitzer might say, but, for the most part, Bernie ignored the ridicule. He was used to it. They were cowards, he told himself. They were the kind of Jews that went like sheep to the cattle cars and concentration camps and gas chambers.

  He could not understand why more of his neighbors did not rush to join his militant outfit, content instead to spend their time playing cards, sitting idly by the pool, or watching the shows every night in the clubhouse. He also could not understand why they chose to belong to other Jewish organizations, like B'nai B'rith, Hadassah, the American Jewish Congress, and the American Jewish Committee. They were in a war for survival. He knew this. Anyone with a modicum of sense could see what was happening.

  "We are the cutting edge," he told his group at their regular meetings. "The rest of our people are asleep. The final battle to kill the Jews is now under way." He would urge them to proselytize, spread the word, make the others understand. He was, of course, the most vocal, the most argumentative.

  "You're making me a laughingstock," Mildred told him one day. "Why do you have to go around so angry? If they don't agree with you, you yell at them. You know what they're saying?"

  "I don't care."

  "They're saying: 'Here comes Bernie Bromberg. Watch out.... If you don't join his army he'll have you shot.'"

  "Who cares?"

  "I care. I don't like going around and hearing that my husband is crazy."

  "One morning they'll wake up and see that I'm right."

  "Maybe," Mildred said gently, patting her husband's arm. "But in the meantime, they're a bunch of old broken-down retired Jews. They may even agree with you, but now they want peace, a little fun, a little relaxation."

  "They
must not relax."

  "Bernie. They're old people. We're old people."

  "And the children?"

  "You want to make me feel guilty about the children?"

  "We are fighting their battle."

  She looked at him and shook her head.

  "Poor Bernie," she said.

  "Poor all of us."

  After about a year the membership of Bernie's unit dwindled. The negotiations in the Middle East seemed to be a long-drawn-out affair, and, aside from the Soviet persecutions, there was nothing particularly dramatic on which to focus.

  "The meetings are getting boring, Bernie," one of the members told him one day. "You know I'm with you one hundred percent. But all we do is talk. We don't do anything."

  Bernie listened patiently to his friend's admonition. The fact was that the real action was in New York at the United Nations, or in Washington in front of the White House. What could they do in Florida, in Poinsettia Beach? He thought about that for a long time. The membership had dwindled by then to ten men.

  "We're still a minyan," he would tell them, "a nucleus."

  But he was worried about the indifference of his fellow Jews. He could not believe they could not see what was as clear as the nose on their faces. When he walked toward a group, they scattered like frightened birds. What he needed to do, he decided, was something so dramatic that they would have to stand up and take notice.

  Finally, one day, he read in the paper that the Egyptian Ambassador to the United States was vacationing at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. To Bernie, Palm Beach, about a half-hour drive away, was the absolute last bastion of the rich goyim Jew-haters.

  "A few years ago, if a Jew set foot in the place they would have fed him to the fishes."

  "There are plenty of Jews in Palm Beach now."

  "Big deal. They always go where they're not wanted."

  He called his group together. It was three in the afternoon and some of the men were still wearing bathing suits and smelling of suntan oil.

  "Tomorrow we're going to picket the Breakers."