Establishment (11 page)

Joe Sweeney, a big, slack-bellied man in his fifties, had a bottle of fine old Irish in his car, and he and Bernie each put down a paper cupful. “What I would give to go with you,” Sweeney said. “It's purpose you got, sonny, and I got no fuckin' purpose but to get drunk twice a week and pretend I'm a man.”

Bernie saw him standing there, waving with both arms, as the planes took off. The flight continued without incident, and late that afternoon they circled the airfield in New Jersey and received their landing instructions.

Bernie's plane came in first, and Jerry Fox brought it in for one of those landings where it is almost impossible to say that you are no longer airborne. “Sonofabitch!” the pilot crowed. “What a beauty, what a daisy!” As they came down, Bernie noticed a cluster of men at the far end of the field, and two of the men came running to meet the plane while it was still in motion.

The airfield, lying in the sandy pine barrens of southern New Jersey, was neither large nor well equipped. It had two X-shaped runways, three hangars, and a wooden control tower. Half a dozen small planes were parked near the hangars. Fox took the whole length of the runway for his landing, then wheeled the plane off onto a parking sheet of asphalt. The two men were running clumsily but hard to intercept it. Bernie saw another group of men leave the hangar and start toward the plane. The second C-54 had landed and the third was coming in.

Bernie's plane was still rolling.

“Leave enough room for the others,” Bernie shouted to Fox. Then he ran back through the plane and opened the door.

The first of the two men was shouting at him, but he couldn't make out the words against the roar of the motors. The plane came to a stop, and Bernie dropped to the ground.

The running man, panting, middle-aged, bald, trying to get his breath, gasped, “Where's Brodsky?”

Bernie pointed to the planes coming in.

“Who are you?”

“Cohen. I'm running the show, for the moment.”

“Bernie Cohen?”

“Right.”

The second man joined them. He was small, dark, dapper, breathless. “I'm Jack Feinstein,” said the bald man, handing Bernie a dollar bill. “Take this. No time for questions. Trust me.”

Bernie took the dollar bill.

“Trust me. No time for questions,” Feinstein gasped. He took a sheaf of folded papers out of his breast pocket and handed a pen to Bernie. “Sign right here. Trust me.”

The papers fluttered and rustled in the wind raised by the landing planes. “What in hell am I signing?” Bernie demanded. “And who are you?”

“Feinstein. Lawyer for the Haganah. Look.” He pointed to the four men walking toward them. “FBI and Customs. You got to sign before they get here. It's a bill of sale. For a dollar and other valuable considerations, you are selling these ten planes to Señor Luis Montego. Lineas Aereas de Panama. For Christ's sake, don't stand there! Believe me.”

Brodsky was running across to them now. The four men were fifty yards away, walking quickly. “That's Feinstein!” Brodsky yelled. “He's O.K.!”

“Sign it, señor, sign it,” Montego begged him.

Bernie took the pen and signed.

“Initial here and here,” Feinstein said.

Bernie scribbled his initials. Feinstein handed the papers to Montego as the four men reached them. The last of the ten planes touched down. Brodsky, Jerry Fox, and Herb Goodman joined the group.

The four men, all in dark business suits and unsmiling, faced the growing group of pilots, navigators, and radio operators. One of them displayed a badge. “Fenton, United States Customs. I have an order here to impound these planes. That means they are not to be entered or moved and nothing is to be removed from them.”

“Let's see your writ,” Feinstein said, still trying to catch his breath.

“Who are you?”

“Feinstein. Attorney.”

“Attorney for who?”

“Señor Luis Montego of Panama Airlines.”

“I don't know how he comes into this,” the Customs man said, taking a paper out of his pocket. “Here's the order. President Truman's proclamation two seven seven six. That puts commercial planes under the Munitions Control Board.”

“Only,” said Feinstein, “when such planes are taken out of the country for implied military purposes.”

Another of the four men showed his badge. “Bently, Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to our information, these planes were purchased yesterday from one Cary Kennedy in Barstow, California, by one Bernie Cohen, to be removed from the United States.”

“So much for Kennedy and the word of God,” Bernie whispered to Brodsky.

“The sonofabitch!”

“If that is the case,” Feinstein said, “the planes are here. You have no right to impound the private property of a United States citizen.”

“Don't be cute, Feinstein.”

“I'll be cuter. The planes don't belong to Cohen. They are the property of my client, Señor Luis Montego of Panama Airlines. In other words, they belong to a foreign commercial airline, and any attempt to impound them will cause no end of trouble, gentlemen. Señor Montego has with him all the permits and export licenses required by law. Will you show them the bill of sale, Señor Montego?”

Smiling, Montego handed Bently the bill of sale Bernie had just signed. Bently glanced at it, handed it to his associates, and said sourly, “It won't wash, Feinstein. We know damn well what those planes are intended for, and it just won't wash.”

Brodsky nudged Bernie. Two men had appeared and were slapping decals on the tail assembly of the planes. The decals read: Lineas Aereas de Panama.

“Stop that right there!” the Customs man yelled. Then he said to the FBI men, “Will you take some action? This is a scam. It's a cheap, underhanded scam.”

“You know the law,” Feinstein said. “You need a court order to void Mr. Montego's export license. When you find a federal judge and get an injunction against the shipment of these planes to Panama and show us that injunction, we will comply with it. Until then, we will resist by every means at our disposal any attempt to prevent the departure of these planes.”

“Are you going to let them pull this off?” Fenton demanded of Bently.

“Let's get to a telephone, and we'll see.”

When they had gone, Brodsky introduced Bernie to Feinstein. The circle of pilots and navigators were grinning with pleasure. A man called Condon joined them, a thin, worried man who was the field manager. “I got a hell of a lot of sympathy for you,” he said, “but this means trouble.”

“Being alive means trouble.”

“That may be. The point is, can you get fueled and take off before dark? They'll get that court order, believe me.”

“I think so. We'll try.”

Feinstein led Bernie and Brodsky and Montego across the field to where his car was parked. He explained that Montego had a Jewish grandmother. “Half the world is Jewish, if you look hard enough. By the way, Luis here will fly with you to Panama. He has a crew waiting there to tear out the seats and convert the planes to cargo carriers.” At his car, he unlocked the trunk and took out two leather suitcases. “Two million dollars,” he said. “Cold cash. Ten Messerschmitts and all the munitions the rest of it will buy. Use it wisely, kids.”

“You mean you left it like that,” Bernie said, “sitting there in the car?”

“What did you expect, an armored car? The trunk was locked.”

Bernie and Brodsky each took a suitcase. “The closest we'll ever get to being millionaires,” Brodsky said.

Three hours later, the sun sinking behind the pines, the planes took off. The Customs men and the FBI had not returned.

***

Sarah Levy came to visit Dan at the hospital. She brought a jar of nuts, a box of homemade cookies, and a bunch of yellow roses. “Although,” she said, looking around the room, “flowers are the last thing you need. You have enough already to start a flower shop.”

“I know. A man never knows his rating in flowers until he's dead.”

“And you're not dead, Danny. I don't like to see you lying there feeling sorry for yourself. You're a lucky man.”

He didn't deny it, aware that she was thinking that it was almost twenty years since her husband, Mark, Dan's partner and best friend, had died of a massive coronary occlusion. That was how it was written for him and his kind; you clawed and scrambled and grabbed and went to bed each night counting another marker of money and power, and then it washed out in the same senseless ending—and for Sarah, the apparently endless years of loneliness and waiting. For what? What did she wait for so patiently? What would Jean wait for? He wondered how old Sarah was now. Seventy? Certainly close to seventy. She was a thin wraith of a woman, her hair white, her face wrinkled, the skin, once so white and pink, having long ago given up the struggle. He could remember clearly the young woman Mark had married, her long yellow hair braided and piled in a crown on her head. Half a century had passed since then. Dan had been only ten years old at the time of Mark's marriage. Mark had been twenty. Dan's father had taken him into the chandler shop on Fisherman's Wharf that was owned and operated by Mark's father, old Moe Levy, who had come across the country with a peddler's wagon, trading gimcracks with the Indians. Sarah had just arrived, nineteen years old, an immigrant girl from Lithuania, alone, without family, tagged and shipped across the breadth of the country to marry a man she had never seen. Frightened, thousands of miles from a home she would never see again, surrounded by the babble of a strange and incomprehensible tongue, she was like a beautiful, terror-stricken young animal.

“You're a lucky man, Danny,” she said again.

“I suppose so.”

“Just give up the cigars and stop drinking and you have another twenty years.”

She spoke in expected clichés.
Did she think that way?
he wondered. Had she given up all the questions to which there were no answers? How desperately he wanted a cigar! A long, cool, sweet-smelling Cuban cigar.

“Joe was here?” she asked him.

“Came up the night it happened.”

“He's a good boy, such a good boy. Do you know how happy Mark would have been, your son married to his granddaughter? On the other hand, my Sally is a very strange girl. She would try the patience of a saint.”

“They'll get along.”

“I hope so. Jean has been here?”

“She's always here. I chased her out.” He knew that Sarah could not reconcile herself to Jean, could not accept that they had come together after May Ling's death. Dan realized that he wanted Sarah to go, to leave him be, and the realization filled him with guilt. What happened to people? He had once adored Sarah. A thousand years ago.

“You're tired,” she said.

“I guess so.”

“Then I let you rest, Danny. Don't worry about anything. Only get well.”

***

The telephone rang, and Barbara, waiting eagerly, anxiously, grabbed it. The operator wanted to know whether she would accept a collect call from a Bernie Cohen in Panama.

“Yes, yes, of course.”

His voice came through, apologizing. “It's just that there was no other way I could call you from here, Bobby.”

“I know. Never mind, Bernie. Oh, I'm so glad to hear from you. Are you all right?”

“Just fine. What about you and Sammy?”

“Strong and healthy and lonely.”

“Don't be lonely. A few more days and it's done. Say, two weeks at the most before I get out of Palestine.”

“Bernie, what are you doing in Panama?”

“I'm at Tocumen Airport here. It's our route, honey. It was all planned and laid out by the guys in New York. We got out of New Jersey two jumps ahead of the sheriff—well, not exactly the sheriff. The FBI and Customs. We're refueling here, and then we fly to the Azores, and then from the Azores to Czechoslovakia, where we pick up our cargo and take it to Palestine.”

“Bernie—” She hesitated. “Bernie, do you have to go all the way? Can't it go on without you?”

“I can't drop out now. Look, Bobby, I called because I was afraid you'd get the news on the radio and begin to worry.”

“What news?”

“We lost a plane. It went down over the ocean. Three good guys—Jesse Levine, Bob Sanders, and Al Green. If I stepped out of it now, it would throw them all into a panic. There's just no way I could do it.”

“But you said the planes were good?”

“They are good. This one developed engine trouble and came down. It happens.”

“And it could happen again.”

“It won't happen again.”

“But three men are dead.”

“We don't know. They may have been picked up. We radioed their position, so there's still hope.” Then she was silent until he asked, “Are you still there, Bobby?”

“I'm just so damn miserable. I've never said that before. I just feel you're stretching this beyond luck.”

“Bobby, I'll be all right.”

Barbara put down the telephone and sat and stared at it. An hour later, when the doorbell rang, she had still not severed the connection between herself and the black instrument she faced. Jean was at the door.

“How is he?”

“Much better, I think,” her mother said. “What were you doing?”

“Staring at the telephone. Bernie called.”

“Where is he?”

“In Panama.” She told her mother what had happened.

“I'd like a drink,” Jean said.

“Have you eaten?”

“Sort of. I'm not hungry. Do you have any brandy?”

Barbara watched her mother sip the brandy. “About men,” Jean said. “They come in two sizes, you know.”

“I didn't know.”

“It's time you did. It has to do with games, which is what differentiates them from animals. Animals don't play games.”