Shapiro prepared for the next day’s deposition of a Raytheon sales manager who’d fired his administrative assistant after she refused to go to a motel with him. But the case seemed silly now in contrast to the news from the Mediterranean. Maybe a million Jews dead. Maybe two million. Another million in the camps and tens of thousands more in the ships.
Shapiro knew he had to do something to take his mind off the news, something that would take all his concentration. That’s what his sailplane was for. No matter how much a next day’s jury argument consumed his thinking—so he could not take a shower without the words of his closing argument forming silently in the back of his throat—he knew that once he strapped himself into the sailplane and wiggled the rudder to signal the towplane pilot he was ready to be pulled into the sky, his mind would focus on nothing except the aircraft and what was happening to the air around it.
“Good to see you again, Ben,” Willy, the glider club’s towplane pilot, said when Shapiro pulled up to the club hanger. Willy was a retired commercial pilot, never having made it to a major carrier before mandatory retirement. “Too bad what’s happening to your people over there. Who would have thought somebody would be crazy enough to mess with an atom bomb? Must have killed himself, too, don’t you think?”
Shapiro gave Willy a nod, then a second quick look, surprised but not upset about the “your people.” He’d never discussed being Jewish with Willy, or hardly anybody else for that matter. For him being Jewish was more a fact of life, like being six feet tall. It wasn’t as if he ever went to religious services or bought Kosher meat for any other reason than that it seemed healthier. Shapiro referred to himself as a “gastronomic Jew,” not a religious one.
“Yeah, too bad, too bad,” Shapiro muttered. “How’s the lift today, Will? Been up yet?”
“It’s developing,” Willy answered, looking up at the puffy white cumulus clouds, a sign of rising air currents. “A hell of a lot of traffic out of South Weymouth, though. Never seen it so busy there.”
South Weymouth Naval Air Station was a recently reopened Navy Reserve air base a dozen miles north of Plymouth from which the Massachusetts Air National Guard flew F-15s up and down the northeastern seaboard.
Military traffic complicated the basic rule of safety in the sky—the rule that said, “Don’t worry. It’s a big sky and you’re in a little airplane.” Gliders were a special problem.
The largest piece of metal in Shapiro’s glider was the thermos bottle he carried his Gatorade in. The German-built, fiberglass-and-carbon-fiber sailplane, with its wings only inches thick and its smoothly curved body, was a better stealth aircraft than the hundred-million-dollar fighters the Air Force was so proud of. The glider returned a radar echo about as well as a hawk with a bottle cap in its mouth, and its circling flight, searching for the same rising air currents as the birds used, was a perfect imitation of a lazy bird of prey.
“Your tax dollars at work, Willy,” Shapiro said. “If those Reserve pilots are up on a Wednesday, you can bet they’re getting time and a half.”
Shapiro walked slowly around the glider, mentally ticking off each of the twenty-seven items on his preflight check list, then kicked the wheel centered under the cockpit and gave each wingtip a good shake, just to prove once again that the plastic plane would stay together when he hit the turbulence that marked entry into strong lift.
He opened the rear canopy in the two-person glider and checked that the safety harness straps were buckled, holding the seat cushions in place so nothing could get loose in the rear cockpit and jam the controls.
Some glider pilots would chat away while going through the preflight ritual. Shapiro, Willy learned from experience, treated each stage of the inspection like a surgical procedure, counting the number of threads showing beyond the safety nuts on each connection. This attention to detail paid off in the courtroom and carried into every aspect of Shapiro’s life, including what was supposed to be recreation. His wife joked that he planned their vacations down to making reservations at gas stations every 375 miles, knowing his car got 400 miles to a tank.
To a woman who never turned off a light or closed a drawer, who tossed away the cap when she opened a new tube of toothpaste, this seemed to be a foible she categorized as one of those “Jewish things” about him caused by a compulsive mother, things she sometimes found enchanting but usually put aside with a laugh. In Sally Spofford’s childhood in the big house on the rocks overlooking the ocean on Boston’s North Shore, there was always somebody else to worry about the details, to turn off the lights, to make sure the gas tank was full.
The tow pilot walked over to Shapiro’s glider.
“Let’s go up to three thousand feet. A tourist flight today,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro squirmed into the front seat in the glider, lying back with his head held up by a small adjustable support. The shape of the glider was designed to minimize air resistance, with the smallest frontal area the designer could devise and still fit the pilot. Shapiro buckled all five straps, one from each side around his waist, one over each shoulder and one coming up between his legs, the “aerobatic” strap designed to keep him from sliding under the instrument panel when he turned the plane upside down. He closed and latched the hinged plastic canopy, put his feet on the rudder pedals and gently grasped the control stick, projecting between his legs, in his right hand.
The tow pilot attached the towrope to the release mechanism in the glider’s nose, tugged to confirm it held tightly, then walked the 200-foot length of the rope to the towplane and started his engine.
Shapiro breathed in, filled his lungs with air, held his breath, then released the air slowly. Chanting his “rope break” mantra of “stick forward, land straight ahead, stick forward, land straight ahead,” the action to take if the towrope broke in the first 200 feet of flight, he stepped down hard on the right rudder pedal, then hard on the left, wiggling the plane’s rudder from side to side to signal the tow pilot he was ready.
He heard the towplane get full throttle, and the next second he was moving along the grass field the gliders used. In thirty yards he had enough speed to ease back on the stick and lift the glider five feet off the grass, holding it there until the towplane rose from the ground. Carefully duplicating each movement of the towplane, wings banked right, then level, then left, then level, the two aircraft rose into the sky, linked by a rope umbilical.
At 200 feet his mantra changed to “sharp turn to the left, stick forward,” knowing he had to act instantly should the rope break above 200 feet of altitude, turning the glider back to the airfield before it ran out of altitude and hit the trees at the end of the runway. The rope had never broken, but some day it would. Shapiro got through life knowing that even though the odds against disaster were a thousand to one, if you did something a thousand times, disaster was a certainty. He expected the towrope to break on every takeoff, just as he expected the arresting police officer to lie at every trial. In both cases, if the expected didn’t happen, he was pleasantly surprised.
The towplane circled and crossed the duck-shaped pond southeast of the grass field that marked the IP, the interception point, where gliders entered the landing pattern for that runway, just as the altimeter needle touched 3,000 feet. As the glider passed over the pond, Shapiro took the yellow release handle in his left hand and gave it a strong pull, then another to be sure the towrope released. Two tugs on the release were standard procedure. Just in case. Following the prearranged pattern, the towplane banked sharply to the left and the glider gently to the right.
Pointing the plane’s nose into the wind coming from the ocean five miles to the east, Shapiro slowed the plane to forty-seven miles an hour, its minimum sinking speed. Although almost all glider competition was in smaller one-person aircraft, Shapiro preferred his two-seater. Few things impressed clients more than a glider ride. Besides, it got them used to being in a position where their lawyer was in complete control of their fate.
Shapiro’s glide
r was, for the moment, state of the art, delivered from Germany the previous winter. With its ninety-foot wingspan, wings smoothed to a tolerance of a thousandth of an inch, and the latest high-tech tubes and turbulators designed to squeeze every ounce of available lift out of the air, the plane had a glide ratio of seventy-five to one, meaning it went forward seventy-five feet for every foot it dropped. From 6,000 feet up, that meant the plane could glide for seventy-five miles even if it found no lift.
The glider could carry a 200-pound passenger in the rear seat. Shapiro had flown two 500-mile cross-country flights in it already, and he was still learning how to press the plane to its limits.
The glider floated over the moored sailboats and fishing boats filling Plymouth Harbor. He spotted the canopy over Plymouth Rock and pictured the crowd of disappointed tourists surrounding the rock, expecting something like Gibraltar and finding an ordinary boulder with a crack down the center.
He gazed at Cape Cod hooking out into the ocean, its tip swirling around at Provincetown like a cat’s tail curled up for the night. To his left he saw Boston, a layer of smog hugging the ground for a thousand feet above glass towers reflecting sunlight. He flew silently for two hours and let the altitude and solitude disconnect him from whatever was waiting for him on the ground—anxious clients, an increasingly distant wife and a marriage that seemed to have passed its expiration date, law partners worrying about collecting fees. Shapiro sometimes wished he could fly off and never land, impossible as that was. Eventually, as always, he steered for the interception point and flew the landing pattern.
Willy helped him pull the glider into the club’s hanger, next to the custom trailer Shapiro used for towing his disassembled plane to other flying areas.
Shapiro, his mind eased by the medicine of the sun, the wind and the sky, opened his car door, sat down, started the engine with its reassuringly powerful Mercedes turbo hum. He rolled down his window, not yet ready to give up the feel of the wind for the sterile coolness of the air conditioner.
As the electric antenna whirred up, the radio came on.
“Two ships carrying thousands of Jewish refuges illegally entered Boston Harbor early this morning,” the radio announcer said. “The Coast Guard ordered the ships quarantined. President Quaid personally directed that nobody be permitted ashore. Spokesmen for the Jewish community in Boston expressed outrage.”
I’d better stop by the office on the way home, Shapiro thought.
CHAPTER 3
Three weeks after the Tel Aviv and Damascus bombs, the anchorage area in Boston Harbor next to Logan Airport’s runway 4R/22L sat empty as Boston went to bed. By dawn two elderly freighters, Greek-owned but flying the Israeli flag, the Iliad and the Ionian Star, swung from their anchors a thousand yards from Downtown Boston.
The ships arrived with between 1,500 and 2,000 passengers each. Their cargo holds, ventilated only when the overhead hatches were left open to the rain and spray, were filled with miserable people, cold, wet, hungry, using buckets for latrines and seawater for washing. The decks, too, were crammed with people lying on every horizontal surface, crowding the railings for fresh air and a place from which to vomit from seasickness, bad water, spoiled food.
The captains had listened to radio reports of countries throughout the Mediterranean blocking their harbors to Israeli refugees. They’d decided to head directly for the United States, one country where they felt sure of finding a welcome.
The ships were immediately quarantined, supposedly for health reasons, in the anchorage area adjacent to the runways of Logan International Airport. They sat at anchor, the miserable, exhausted people on board not understanding why America, a country of immigrants, barred its door to them.
The ships presented a problem—not because America could not absorb three or four thousand refugees, but because it did not know if it wanted to.
By 2021, years of massive budget deficits, soaring oil prices and healthcare costs, and record-high immigration from Mexico, Central America and Asia brought the US to its knees. Wall Street was a wreck as banks again collapsed and real estate values crashed.
Congress responded by demonizing newcomers, in much the same way Hitler blamed Jews for Germany’s economic hardships after World War I. Turning their backs on the Statue of Liberty and egged on by the former president, Congress passed the American Pride Identification and Display Act, a law that created a national identification card program, a law aimed at identifying the millions of Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, Thais, Chinese, Nigerians, Somalis, Cambodians, Vietnamese, and other people who had come to the country by one means or another for thirty years.
“Americards” were issued to every person who could show proof of citizenship: a birth certificate, a passport, naturalization papers. Within a month, some 275 million Americans were registered. At least thirty million others—people who could not prove citizenship or legal residency—were not and could not be registered. Like credit cards, Americards included a computer chip encoded with the person’s name and registration number, plus physical data such as height, weight, eye and hair color and, most powerfully of all, a digitized photograph, fingerprints and a retina scan.
The enforcement phase took longer, but the public was behind that effort, too. Employers were required to print workers’registration numbers on their paychecks. Paying workers in cash was prohibited. Employees with no registration number were not allowed to be paid. Payroll checks with no numbers could not be cashed. Employers hiring unregistered workers were fined. Repeatedly.
Welfare workers were required to verify that recipients were registered. No Americard, no welfare.
Schools checked students’registration, with the threat of having federal subsidies cut off if they refused. Unregistered students could not attend school. The law’s intent was brutal and obvious: to ostracize immigrants and starve them out of the country. No work, no food, no housing, no education, no health care. The system worked. The cards were issued in January 2021, and by May the nation’s workplaces, schools, welfare rolls and most public places were purged of illegal aliens.
The backlash stunned people. News stories told of immigrant families hiding in their apartments, of mothers, fathers and children slowly starving to death; of mothers walking the streets as prostitutes because that profession did not require registration cards; of shoplifting arrests in supermarkets. Crime, always an alternative way to get by, became the only way for millions of people locked out of the American dream to feed themselves and their children.
That wave of crime, of course, created yet one more backlash. Get these people out, send them back where they came from. The deportation planes and ships left New York, Miami and Los Angeles daily. The overcrowded, impoverished countries these people fled from were forced to reabsorb them.
Then the Iliad and the Ionian Star limped into Boston Harbor and became the focus of national debate.
“Let them in. These people are different; they are victims of war,” some said. “They are good refugees, not bad ones—not Salvadorians, Nicaraguans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Mexicans.” “These refugees are Jews, like so many powerful and famous Americans.” “America has always accepted Jewish refugees,” the historically ignorant said.
“They are our brothers, our family,” cried American Jews.
Even former president Donald Trump weighed in, tweeting that the Jews sitting on ships in Boston Harbor should be allowed to join the Great Society because they share America’s Northern European heritage and values. “They look like us, they think like us, they contribute to our society instead of milking it like other groups,” Trump said. Liberals backed by immigrants’rights groups, youth, aging progressives, church groups and some power nonprofits blasted Trump and Jewish sympathizers for their hypocrisy. No special treatment for anybody. “That would be wrong,” they said. Especially wrong for the murderers of Damascus.
So the ships sat in Boston Harbor. Surrounded by America, floating in American water, watchin
g Americans cruise the harbor in their sailboats, watching American airplanes thundering over their heads to land at the nearby American airport, watching American cars drive on American streets. Surrounded by America but not allowed in.
CHAPTER 4
The ebonized cherry table in the conference room at Shapiro, McCarthy and Green felt freshly oiled but of course left no residue on fingers rubbing across its surface. The table, the conference room, the art on the walls and the entire office were on the top floor of a former Howard Johnson’s chocolate warehouse on Boston’s now fashionable waterfront. The conference room was where lawyers from other firms sat during depositions, where they sized up the firm, estimating where their opponents placed in the pecking order of Boston’s legal community. The conference room was where clients were introduced to the firm’s three partners and where fees were first discussed.
The firm’s three partners were Jewish, Irish and black, former assistant district attorneys who had to take second mortgages to meet their first year’s overhead. They had grown the business and now employed eight associates.
The three young men sitting at the conference table across from Ben Shapiro were obviously impressed—and uncomfortable—not knowing what to do with their hands or whether they could put their elbows on the table. They had not spoken except to mumble a barely audible greeting. The middle-aged man with them didn’t share their problems. He sat back. Listened closely to Shapiro.
“Your first problem is a legal doctrine called standing,” Shapiro said, speaking to the older man but occasionally glancing at the three others, noting that every time he looked at them they looked away.
“What this doctrine means is that not just anybody can walk into court and say a government action is unconstitutional. Only people directly affected by a law can challenge it. You can’t challenge a law setting the drinking age at twenty-five if you are thirty years old because that law doesn’t affect you. Before we can challenge what the government is doing, we have to show that somehow, even in a minor way, it affects you.”
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