Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  Shapiro smiled, licked the tip of a finger and drew it downward in front of his face, scoring one hypothetical point for his wife.

  “Yes, yes. You are so well versed on Jewish law, Sally. Okay, I agree that, technically, Adam isn’t Jewish.”

  She smiled at that concession.

  “But no matter what an Orthodox rabbi might say about Adam, the Nazis would have considered him to be a Jew. That’s what matters,” Shapiro said. He was startled by the angry expression in his wife’s face.

  “Don’t you start again on the Nazis—the goddamn fucking Nazis. They’re long ago and far away, like Star Wars. I’m sick and tired of your talk about Nazis. This is America, not Germany.”

  “The Nazis considered anybody a Jew if he had three Jewish grandparents,” Shapiro continued, undeterred. “That would be my father’s parents and my mother’s parents. Four Jewish grandparents for Adam. There’s no way my son isn’t a Jew. And, Sally, you know that anybody who goes through life with a name like Adam Shapiro is not going to be confused for an Irish Catholic.”

  “I kept my last name,” she said. “Maybe my son should start using my name rather than yours, if your name is going to be such a burden for him. After all, he’s going to be living with me. You understand that much, don’t you?”

  “I won’t discuss that now, Sally,” Shapiro said. “I have to leave.” He closed the zipper on the bag and lifted it from the bed. “I’ve told you this time after time,” he continued, placing his hands on his wife’s shoulders. She shook herself, causing his hands to drop. “I’ve told you. What is happening now is the most important civil rights event of my lifetime. This country is going down a wrong path. This country is not my America. Sally, it isn’t your America either.

  “My whole career has been working for civil rights. How in the world can I turn my back on this struggle? Now? Here? I wasn’t around when the Indians were massacred. I wasn’t born when Japanese were locked up in concentration camps. I was a child during the civil rights marches in the South.

  “But I’m an adult now, for this struggle. More than just any adult, Sally. I’m in the center of things, in a position to change things for the better, to stand up to this asinine government and turn it around. I can’t say no now. It isn’t in me. You wouldn’t respect me if I did. Adam wouldn’t respect me. Sally, I wouldn’t respect myself.”

  “I don’t respect you now,” she said. “I don’t respect a man who abandons his family, a man who chooses to expose his family to shame, to humiliation, to beatings. You know what’s been happening to Adam at school, the way they’re teasing him and bullying him for being a Jew, because his father is some big-time Jew.

  “I don’t respect a man who puts his child through that. Maybe you should think some more about those Nazis you keep talking about. Would you respect a father who sent his son to the concentration camps because he was too proud to let his son call himself anything but a Jew? I don’t think so. Having a live Christian son is better than a dead Jewish one. I’m right on that and you know it.”

  “Well, it hasn’t come to that,” Shapiro said.

  “Not yet,” Sally replied. “But Jews killed Americans right here in Boston and, it seems, have gotten away with it. Other Jews sheltered them and got away with it. More Jews dropped a goddamn atomic bomb on innocent Arabs, and they haven’t been caught yet either.”

  The backpack dropped from Shapiro’s hand. For once, he was at a loss for words.

  “People aren’t too pleased with you Jews these days. Heaven forbid if something more should happen. But I tell you, you may feel you don’t have any choice, that you have to hold yourself out as the big public Jew. Well, I do have a choice, and so does Adam. I’m not a Jew. He’s not a Jew. And I don’t have to be married to a Jew if I don’t want to be. I’m telling you, Ben. You walk out that door and drive to Washington and by the time you come back here, I’ll be living with my parents and Adam will be with me.”

  Shapiro left without a word. He did not feel like a hero going off to do battle. It was not the argument with Sally that made him feel a twinge of guilt, however. That last argument was a replay of what they’d been going through for more than a week.

  He had not told Sally about Judy Katz, had not told his wife that he would be driving to Washington with an extremely attractive thirty-one-year-old woman and probably spending the next few days, and nights, with her. For that—not for leaving his wife, hardly at all for leaving his son—for that he felt guilty.

  But guilt was soon replaced with excitement, at both the prospect of the huge demonstration and at who he was about to share that excitement with.

  CHAPTER 44

  The two young men had no idea how many sticks of TNT to use for each explosive belt. They decided to use as many as would fit around their waists, carrying the entire case to Sam Abdullah’s car. The boys returned to search for blasting caps, the small detonators that set off the explosives. They found them in a locked metal cabinet on the far wall of the shack. They smashed the lock on the cabinet with a hammer, not knowing whether the blows would set off the detonators inside.

  They drove back to Sam’s house and carried their loot to his room, thankful his parents were gone on a short vacation. Sam regretted not having the opportunity to say goodbye to his parents. I’ll see them again in Paradise, he thought. I hope they’ll be proud of me.

  Putting the devices together was simple. Their research was limited to looking for the term explosive belt in Wikipedia. After that, they’d made a trip to the Eastern Mountain Sports store at the North Shore Mall, Sam’s target, where they’d each bought a fancy khaki fisherman’s vest covered with pockets across its front and back. Not quite what their Palestinian brothers wore, but it would serve the same purpose.

  The Wikipedia article said the real killing power came not from the explosives alone but from the hundreds of small steel balls usually wrapped around the explosives. Finding several thousand steel balls would be no problem. Not in modern America. Not with next-day delivery from Amazon.

  “They have everything there,” Sam said. “I’ll bet there’s something we can use.”

  But searches for ball bearings and steel balls turned up nothing helpful. Then Sam had an idea. “What about that stuff that shotguns shoot? What’s that stuff called?” he asked.

  “You’ve got to be kidding. What do shotguns shoot? What color is George Washington’s white horse, jerk-off? Shotguns shoot stuff called shot. As in ‘shot’gun.”

  “Oh yeah. I knew that,” Sam said sheepishly. “Well, do a search for shot at Amazon.”

  That worked. They could buy 250 quarter-inch round steel balls for less than four dollars.

  “That’s a good price. Let’s get a lot of them.”

  They decided it would be less suspicious if they split up their order, so over the course of a few hours they placed five orders for steel shot, alternating their names. They paid extra for overnight FedEx early delivery, knowing this was one Visa bill they’d never pay.

  Five separate packages arrived the next morning at Sam’s house. They divided the balls between their two vests, pouring the balls into the pockets containing the explosives, then duct-taping the tops of the pockets so the balls would not roll out.

  Wiring the explosives together and to the detonators was equally simple.

  “I’ve done this lots of times,” Al said. “The foreman showed me how to do it when we were blasting ledge for those six houses my dad put up last year. Boy, was my dad pissed when he heard what I’d been doing, but it was real safe and loads of fun. You put a blasting cap on the end of each stick, like this.” He demonstrated for his friend, trying his hardest to hide the shaking of his hand. “Then you run the wires from the cap to the detonator, but I’m not gonna do that until we’re ready to go for real, okay?”

  “Okay with me; show me how.”

  The construction company used a complicated radio-controlled detonator so the explosives could be set off from a distanc
e. Obviously, that was not needed for the explosive vests. They’d made their own detonator from a doorbell switch and a six-volt lantern battery, both from the hardware store.

  “Ring the bell and BOOM,” Al told his friend.

  When the vests were completed, TNT and shot taped tightly into the various pockets, front and back, and all the wires run from the blasting caps to the doorbell buttons in the front right pockets, Al suggested they put them on and take pictures of themselves.

  Sam held up his hand. After the excitement of handling the explosives and constructing the devices, his voice suddenly took on a serious tone.

  “No, remember, it won’t be us doing this,” he said. “It’s going to be a couple of Jews. The whole thing doesn’t work if we do it. It has to be a couple of Jews. We can’t leave any photos or make any farewell videos.”

  “I know, I know,” Al replied. “I was just worked up, you know, like I was in the Intifadah or something.

  “I thought we’d shout ‘Long Live Israel’or something before we set them off. What were you thinking?”

  Sam smiled. “That’s a good start,” he said. “But we only get one shot at this, so let’s do the full thing—you know, dress up like those religious-type Jews.”

  “Okay, do you know what they look like, the real ones?” Al asked. “Hey, let me try something.”

  He turned back to the computer and typed Jew picture into Google. The screen filled with photographs of men and boys in black coats and hats. Many had curls of hair descending in front of each ear.

  “We’ve gotta do that hair thing,” Al said, getting excited. “Nobody but a Jew would do that.”

  In the end, their costumes were simple. Another trip to the mall got them each a long black overcoat and black hats that looked a bit more stylish than in the photos from the Google search, but not by much. An embarrassing visit to a beauty salon at the mall got them a black wig, from which they extracted enough long hairs to give each a respectable lock, which could be held in place by a bobby pin snatched from Sam’s mother’s dresser drawer.

  They decided fake beards would look too fake.

  “Hey, we’ll be young Jews, too young to shave,” Al joked.

  On the way out of the mall they made a final, spontaneous purchase at a pushcart titled Flag Us Down. Abdullah spoke to the store clerk.

  “Do you have any Israeli flags? You know, those blue ones with the star on them?” he asked.

  Eighteen-year-old Carol Rosenthal, whose mother owned the pushcart, was surprised at the request. She looked at the two young men. They sort of look Jewish, I guess, she thought as she rummaged through the cardboard boxes in which her merchandise was stored.

  “Here are a couple,” she said, lifting the top of a box. “I think these are the last two I have.” She looked at the two young men sadly. “I don’t think they make these anymore.”

  “Yes, I know they don’t,” Abdullah answered. “I doubt if they ever will again.”

  He paid in cash. They returned to his house, to his room, to examine their purchases and equipment.

  When the vests were completed and the costumes ready, the two young men became serious. Deadly serious.

  “I think we should pray first,” Sam said.

  He reached under his bed and unrolled the two prayer rugs he kept there, keeping the second because Al seemed to spend more time at Sam’s house than at his own.

  They knelt on the rugs and chanted, alternating between leaning with their foreheads on the rug and sitting up straight. After ten minutes they stopped and stood, then helped each other dress.

  The vests were heavy to lift but comfortable enough to wear once the weight was carried by their shoulders. They put on white shirts, like in the photos, over the vests, then black pants, black socks and black shoes. They pinned the hair locks on each other, then put on their hats and, finally, the black coats.

  Then they stood a few feet apart, staring at each other.

  “You look like such a Jew,” Sam said, shocked at the transformation of his friend’s appearance. “You really do.”

  Al Farouk, too, was surprised at his friend’s appearance. “This is going to work,” he said. “People are going to think we’re a couple of Jews.”

  Sam looked at his watch, remembering for a moment that it was a birthday present from his parents.

  “It’s four thirty now,” he said. “We can get to the malls in forty-five minutes. Let’s give ourselves a half hour in case there’s traffic and to get set up. We blow the bombs at six thirty. The food courts ought to be packed then. We stand on a table, give some speech about Israel, shout out something that sounds like Hebrew and then—”

  “And then we find out whether there really is a Paradise,” his friend finished for him.

  “Well, whether or not there is Paradise,” Sam said, “we’re sure gonna create some hell for the Jews we leave behind. Let’s go, brother.”

  They walked downstairs and out the front door to their separate cars, each holding his breath when the cars hit bumps in the road.

  CHAPTER 45

  After circling the same block three times, Ben Shapiro identified Judy Katz’s building and spotted her sitting on the stone steps leading to the front door. He honked his horn. She stood, waving.

  Katz did not look like the crime-busting prosecutor. Dressed in decidedly unlawyerly jeans and a floppy, bright-yellow cotton tank top, Katz could have passed for one of the college students crammed into luxury apartments in her neighborhood. Her long black hair was in a ponytail sprouting through the hole in the back of her baseball cap, a cap that bore a Star of David on the front, above the words Camp Tikvah.

  She tossed her L.L.Bean duffel bag into the back and sat in the passenger seat.

  “I can’t tell you how excited I am about this,” she said.

  “Well, thanks for coming down a day early,” Shapiro said. “I got drafted to stand by in case there are any last-minute legal hassles.”

  Shapiro smiled. This was something entirely new for him. Despite several temptations, he had never been unfaithful to his wife—a few phone sex sessions and porn films while he was on out-of-town trips, maybe, but that did not count as infidelity in his book. Shapiro didn’t know where this escapade with Katz was going to lead, but he was surprised at how easy it was for him to be attracted to this young woman and at how she, for some reason he could not comprehend, seemed to be attracted to him.

  The expectation that he would return to an empty house and that this separation was for real did little to hold him back. This could be the world’s fastest rebound romance, he thought. He didn’t realize that, more often than not, such rebounds involved overlaps rather than a gap.

  “You look ready for a political demonstration,” Shapiro said to Katz. “Did you bring your gas mask?”

  A troubled expression clouded her face.

  “Was I supposed to?” she asked. “Shit, we had a shelf of them in the tactical room at work, you know. I could have grabbed one.”

  Shapiro laughed. “No, no, I was kidding. I had one in college, government surplus. It never worked. I became a connoisseur of crowd control gas back then. There was tear gas. You dripped water or Visine in your eyes for that. Pepper gas. Hated that stuff. You never ever rubbed your eyes when they used that stuff. It caused more irritation. And, of course, there was that favorite when the pigs wanted to get nasty with you, CN gas. That made you puke your guts out. Didn’t feel much like taking over the dean’s office with a face full of CN, I’ll tell you.”

  Shapiro saw the shocked look on the young woman’s face.

  “Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “I’ve been accused more than once of never outgrowing college. And also of telling far too many stories.”

  “You’re like a living history lesson,” Katz said, with a sly grin. “I dressed as a hippie for Halloween once.”

  “Ouch,” Shapiro said, placing his hand over his heart. “That one hurt.”

  They both laughed. Levi turne
d the car onto the Massachusetts Turnpike. “I figure we can get there in about eight hours,” he said. “I have an iron bladder, so let me know when you want to stop for a break.”

  They rode in silence for several minutes. Shapiro glanced at the woman sitting to his right. He smiled at the clichéd thought that she could be his daughter. But she sure isn’t, he added to himself, noticing a pale, untanned spot high on her left arm. She noticed his glance.

  “Laser surgery,” she said, tapping the spot with her right hand. “A tattoo. A dare.” Katz grinned, staring straight ahead through the windshield.

  Much as he wondered about that tattoo, Shapiro lacked the nerve to ask what image could have been so embarrassing to a thirty-one-year-old woman that she’d had it surgically removed.

  He tried another topic.

  “So, what happened at work? Have you quit, or did Arnie Anderson fire you first?”

  “Actually, I haven’t officially quit, or been fired yet,” she said. “I’ve been trying to set up a meeting with Arnie for days, but he keeps putting me off. We’re scheduled to meet Monday morning. That’s when I’ll hand in my badge.”

  “I’d like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation,” Shapiro said. “My feeling is that he’ll be relieved to have you go. Arnie’s not a bad guy, but these cases have put him in a tough situation.”

  “Tough situation for lots of people,” Katz said. “The story is that the Queen quit over these cases.”

  “Good for her,” Shapiro said. “That’s half the problem now; people know right from wrong, but when their ass, or their job, is on the line, they follow orders now and hope to justify them later. Be sure and take good notes at that meeting with Arnie. I’ll be curious.”

  They sat in silence as the car roared down the highway. Shapiro, again, was the first to break the silence.

  “Damn,” he said. “I forgot a phone call I was going to make before I left. You’re going to have to pretend you’re not here. This is going to be a confidential discussion. No sneezing or coughing, okay?”