Establishment (16 page)

“Where the devil are you going?”

“Twenty guns left in jeep.”

“They're not eight hundred meters away anymore. Will you use your head and look.”

Two Arabs had rounded the fold of the hill, and as Bernie pointed, they saw the jeep and raced toward it. Benash raised his rifle and fired. One of the Arabs dropped. The second man stopped in his tracks, stared at Benash, standing in the doorway of the hut, and flung a wild shot from his gun. Benash fired a second time. The man's head whipped back and he crumpled to the ground.

Benash said something in Hebrew, then snapped at Bernie, “I go get guns now.”

“No!”

“Fuck you, Yankee,” Benash said, and he flung himself down the hillside in wild, sure-footed leaps.

“God willing, there's only two of them,” Kober said.

The three men crouched in the door of the hut, watching. Benash reached the jeep, loaded himself with the Mausers, and started back up the hillside. Another Arab rounded the protecting fold of the hill. Hardly thinking of what he was doing, Bernie raised his rifle and fired. The man fell. Somewhere deep in his mind, the thought raced,
I've killed a man. God help me, I've killed a man
. Stone chips splattered from the edge of the doorway. Kober and Brodsky dropped flat. Bernie stood there. Now there were Arabs firing from both flanks, and three of them topped the ridge behind which the jeep was sheltered. Benash was about thirty paces from the hut when he was hit. He stumbled for three or four steps, the Mausers falling from his shoulders and leaving a trail behind him; then he collapsed and fell face down. Bernie raced to him and heaved him up on his shoulder in a single convulsive movement. Leaving the shelter of the hut, picking up Benash, and getting back with him could not have taken half a minute, but to Bernie it felt like an eternity, slow, slow steps back to the hut, where Brodsky and Kober crouched in the doorway, emptying the magazines of their rifles. Bernie felt the shock of bullets against Benash's body. Benash had been hit twice more, but the first shot, through his body from the side, would have been the fatal one. He was dead when they laid him down in the hut.

Brodsky and Kober lay flat in the doorway, maintaining a steady fire through a haze of smoke. “Dov is dead,” Bernie told them.

“Poor pigheaded bastard!”

“What the hell are you shooting at?” he demanded. “Do you see any of them?”

“No.”

“Then stop wasting ammunition.”

They stopped shooting and rolled out of the doorway into the protection of the walls.

“Plenty of ammunition, old chap,” Kober said to him. “It will outlast us, you know.”

The hut was roofless, low-walled. Standing erect, Bernie could see over the walls. There were Arabs in the distance, tiny figures. He could count at least thirty of them.

“Our own stupidity,” Kober said. “You're an outsider, but Brodsky and I should have known better.”

“I came through here six months ago,” Brodsky remembered. “They were gentle as lambs.”

“They're not very gentle now, are they?”

“Will they rush us?” Bernie asked him.

“In the daylight? No. Why should they? They'll come at night and toss a few grenades.
Finis
.”

“They have grenades?”

“Oh, yes. Between the Mufti and the British, they're well supplied. The curse of being Jewish, Cohen. Nobody really likes us.”

“Then we have to get out of here before it's actually dark. I imagine they'll wait until it's damn good and dark.”

“I'm beginning to like you, Cohen,” Kober said. “I put you down as just another arrogant bastard. But I must say, I like your style.” He turned to Brodsky. “Cheer up, Irv. The best or the worst is yet to come. Either way, it'll be a change. And gratefully. Notice the smell in here? Sheep dip. They gather it and use it for their fires.”

“What about poor Benash?”

“What about him? We can't bury him and we can't take him with us. Our own chances are so thin, we can't even properly weep over him.”

“Do you mind if I say the Kaddish for him?” Brodsky asked bitterly.

Regarding him strangely, Kober shook his head. He took his rifle and lay down in the doorway. The Arabs were shooting again. It was late afternoon now, and the hills cast long, dark shadows. The Arabs were invisible in the cover of those shadows. There was a velvet quality to the landscape, the hills becoming softly rose where the sun struck them. Bernie closed Benash's eyes, and Brodsky spread his handkerchief over his face. Bernie felt that they were both thinking the same thing, that the Arabs castrated the Jewish dead, disemboweled them and frequently cut off their heads. The fierce hawk had fled from Benash. His face in death was like a small boy's. An occasional bullet struck the doorway, sending chips flying from the stone. “Irv, step back,” Bernie said gently. Brodsky moved out of the line of the doorway and began to intone the prayer for the dead, swaying slightly, the way Bernie had seen Rabbi Blum sway so many years ago. Rabbi Blum had taken Bernie out of the orphanage and raised him. Rabbi Blum had never killed a living thing, not even an insect. He was an outsider. He lived on earth as an outsider. What was it Kober had said to him only moments before? “You're an outsider, Cohen.” Filled with overwhelming sadness, he listened to the Kaddish. It was too late. Everything came too late.

“Say ye amen,” Brodsky said in the ancient Aramaic in which the prayer was composed.

“Amen,” Bernie whispered.

Kober was very still. The firing outside picked up, increased; it was still at least two hours to sunset.

“Show the flag,” Bernie said to Kober, his voice thick and harsh. “Lay down some fire. They're getting bold.”

Kober didn't move. Brodsky crawled to him, then said to Bernie, “He's dead.” The bullet was in his forehead. He had died instantly and silently.

“They're all around us,” Brodsky said tonelessly. “There's no way out of here, Bernie.”

With the butt of his rifle, Bernie pounded a stone out of the back wall. “Take the back,” he said to Brodsky. “I'll take the doorway. Keep up a constant fire. Maybe Kober was right and they won't attack until dark. We'll try to slip away before then.”

When Bernie's Mauser stopped firing, Brodsky listened for it to start again. He was shooting through the loophole Bernie had made, only shooting; there was nothing to see, only smoke and the deep shadows of twilight. But Bernie's gun remained quiet.

“Oh, my God,” Brodsky whispered. He yelled, “Bernie! Bernie! Don't leave me alone here!”

He ran over to Bernie, who lay quietly in the doorway, and shook him. Then he rose and faced the three Arabs standing in front of the doorway. It took just an instant for the sight of them to register before they fired point-blank, and his body fell across Bernie's.

There were those who described Lucy Sommers as an austere person. She was a dark, intense woman of forty years, the only child of Alvin Sommers, once president of the Seldon Bank and now retired at the age of seventy-nine. People have a rhythm in their lives, and some live in their early years and some in their late years. Sommers became president of the bank at sixty-five, and at seventy-nine, he was a hard, dry specimen who promised to go on forever. Lucy was tall, handsome, and possessed of a good figure. She rarely smiled, and she did nothing in the way of make-up or hairdo to enhance her looks. She was the sort of person about whom fashionable women were wont to say, “It kills me to think of what I could do for her in two hours with the proper face and the proper clothes.” But no one ever did it or even suggested it.

When it became known to the few hundred people in San Francisco who composed what they considered “the city” that Tom Lavette was to remarry and that Lucy Sommers would be his bride, there were many and vociferous expressions of disbelief. In fact, there was no one in that entire circle who was more the total opposite of Eloise Clawson, his first wife, than Lucy Sommers.

Tom, on the other hand, felt comfortable with Lucy, a feeling he had never experienced with Eloise. In some ways, she reminded him of his mother, although the only physical resemblance was in their common height. Eloise had been shy, retiring, and always uncertain with Tom. Lucy was calm and firm, and at this point she knew precisely what she desired in a marriage.

“They say one doesn't speak ill of the dead,” she once said to Tom. “I don't know why. I think it's much more damaging to speak ill of the living. My husband is dead, but there is nothing good I care to say about him. He was an animal. I think you ought to know that, Tom. I don't know whether I would ever have enjoyed sex if I had married someone else. Whatever the possibilities were, he spoiled them. After a year of marriage, we separated, but I must say that the memory lingers on. You have asked me to marry you. I want to be specific about the kind of arrangement you would be entering into.”

“I have asked you to be my wife, not my bed partner.”

“And you don't consider that rather strange?”

“No stranger than a dozen marriages I know about, where that arrangement exists. The only difference is that we are putting our cards on the table.”

“Do you have a mistress?” she asked bluntly.

“No.”

“I wouldn't object to it, but I would object to it becoming known. I will not be an object of laughter or contempt. I respect you and I think you respect me. We are both of us very wealthy, and we are both ambitious. My father owns three acres on Pacific Heights, which he has promised to me. I think you know the property. It has a magnificent view. I want you to understand what I will ask of you.”

“I already have a house on Pacific Heights,” Tom said rather lamely.

“I know. It's not the sort of house I contemplate, and it also happens to be another woman's house. I am marrying you, Tom, because I like you. I am also marrying you because I feel that between us we can be successful. Success to you means wealth and political power; I understand that. However, I am a woman, and I have my own dreams. I intend to be the most fashionable and successful hostess on the West Coast and, when the time comes, in Washington as well. I don't know whether you realize how much you need a person like me. I know that our circle has a certain impression of me. I could not care less. When the time comes, an invitation to our home will be like an invitation to the White House. Politics is something more than the formalities of the governor's mansion and the legislature. Politics is a question of power and the cultivation of people who have that power.”

After that conversation, Tom changed his opinion of Lucy Sommers. He almost retreated from the marriage, caught between fear and admiration. He was torn between a sense of impending danger and the desire to give himself into the hands of a very strong woman. The need for security won out.

After speaking to his mother, he told Lucy of her suggestion that they be married abroad.

“What nonsense!” Lucy exclaimed.

“I don't think so. My mother will not show up without my father.”

“Then it's high time you made your peace with your father. We will have sufficient enemies without having them in the family.”

“Oh, no. Lucy, I have not spoken to the man for twenty years.”

“He's in the hospital now. What better time is there? If you don't do it now, you never will.”

***

Harvey Baxter's assistant was a young man with the unlikely name of Boyd Kimmelman. He was very bright, had served with the judge advocate's office during the war, finished law school a year later, and displayed an aggressive sharpness of thought that disturbed Baxter as often as it pleased him. Now he was violently disagreeing with a position Baxter had taken.

“As sure as hell,” he said to Barbara, “they're going to ask you, ‘Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?'

They were meeting in Baxter's office, the two lawyers and Barbara, the morning of the day before she was due to leave for Washington. Young Sam, in his stroller, sucked a pacifier and good-naturedly observed the proceedings.

“That doesn't bother me,” Barbara said. “I am not and I never have been. All I have to do is answer truthfully.”

“Exactly,” Baxter said.

“Oh, no. No, sir, if you will permit me. It's just not that simple. Those cookies hold all the cards. Suppose you were at some meeting, some civil liberties meeting, maybe a meeting in defense of the itinerant farmworkers. From what Harvey says, you go for that kind of thing. Am I right?”

“You may be right, Mr. Kimmelman.”

“Call me Boyd, Mrs. Cohen. As Harvey will tell you, I'm too pushy to be entitled to respect.”

“All right, Boyd. Yes, I've been to meetings. I've been to civil liberties meetings, and just two months ago I went to a meeting in defense of the Hollywood writers. I think that's my right, isn't it?”

“Today? Who knows? The point I'm making is this. Those creeps on the Un-American Committee, they have access to information, they have access to the FBI files, and you may be sure that every one of those protest meetings is covered by the FBI. You're not exactly unknown in this town, Mrs. Cohen. So let's say that you deny under oath that you ever have been a member of the Party. Then one of their paid informers stands up and swears he saw you at a communist meeting.”

“He'd be lying.”

“Can you swear it was not a communist-organized meeting?”

“For heaven's sake, Boyd,” Baxter broke in, “that doesn't make her a communist.”

“Can she prove she's not? How? Suppose an informer swears that she is.”

“But I am not,” Barbara said. “How could anyone swear that I am? What proof could they offer?”

“You're old-fashioned,” Kimmelman said impatiently. “Those babies are not running a court of law. They're not interested in proof or the rules of evidence. They're running a Star Chamber. All they're interested in is headlines, and they make headlines by nailing you. I know you're not Jewish, Mrs. Cohen, but your name is, and they're going to suck on that for starters.”

“Come on, Boyd,” Baxter said with annoyance. “You see anti-Semitism everywhere.”

“Only where it is.”

“And Barbara can't refuse to answer a pertinent question. That's contempt, and I will not subject her to a contempt.”

“Contempt is only a misdemeanor, punishable by a year in prison—if they cite her. Perjury is a felony—a five-year offense. Would you subject her to that?”

“Now just hold on,” Barbara said. “This whole discussion is beginning to sound like a scene from Kafka, the two of you arguing about a one-year versus a five-year jail sentence. I am not a criminal. I have done nothing illegal. I am a San Francisco housewife with a baby, and I have no intentions of going to jail.”

“Nor shall you,” Baxter assured her. “I think Boyd here is raising ridiculous ghosts. I cannot conceive of anyone testifying that you are a member of the Communist Party.”

“I can,” Kimmelman said.

“Suppose I were a member of the Communist Party?” Barbara asked. “Would that send me to prison? I seem to have been laboring under the quaint and old-fashioned illusion that we live in a democracy.”

“We still do,” Baxter affirmed. “Absolutely, and I will not let a handful of bigots in Washington convince me otherwise. If you were a member of the Communist Party, Barbara, and they asked you that question, you would simply admit it. That is, if you wished to. They cannot punish you for a truthful answer to a question.”

“Oh, my word,” Kimmelman said.

“Boyd,” Baxter said, “we differ in our attitude toward the law. I regard it as a shield that man has erected through the ages as a defense of the best of civilization. You regard it as an antagonist, to be anticipated and outwitted. No, hold on,” he said as Kimmelman began to protest. “Those are precisely the qualities that I treasure in you, but you are young and cynical. Whenever I encounter a situation of this sort, I ask myself what Sam Goldberg would have done. I have absolutely no doubts on that score here. Sam would have advised Barbara to answer every question truthfully and forthrightly. I simply do not share your fears about informers and entrapment. For Barbara to refuse to answer a question because she feared entrapment would be folly.”

“So be it.” Kimmelman sighed.

“We sit and talk about this ridiculous committee,” Barbara said, “and the only thing that really disturbs me is why I have not heard from my husband. For two days I've tried to call Tel Aviv, and I simply cannot get through. I send cables and receive no answer. There must be some way to reach Bernie.”

“It's a very disturbed situation,” Baxter said. “You realize that, Barbara. Palestine is in a turmoil, practically a state of war.”

“I know, and that worries me so. Harvey, there must be some way. You must know people who can make inquiries and get answers.”

“Mrs. Cohen,” Kimmelman said, “my own feeling is that your husband may have sent you several cables. They are not getting through. The telephone lines are tied up with priorities. I know someone in the local Zionist organization who may be able to swing a priority, and I'll be happy to see him this afternoon and see whether we can get a call through. Trouble is, it's almost midnight in Tel Aviv, so we'll have to wait a bit. I have a cousin who's some kind of officer in the Haganah—that's the Jewish army—and if I can reach him, I may have some news for you.

“On the other hand, it may take a few days, and then there's the possibility that your husband's on his way home. I doubt that he could get a plane out of Palestine, so he may have had to take a ship to Italy or France. If he sent a cable, it may be lost or delayed. Why don't you let me get into this while you and Harvey are in Washington?”

“I'd be so grateful,” Barbara told him. “And you will let me know the moment you hear anything?”

“Of course.”

The baby's mood changed, and suddenly Samuel Thomas Cohen filled the office with the wailing sound of a healthy pair of lungs.

“I'll get him home,” Barbara said. “That's almost indecent in a law office.”

“It's a fine sound of life,” Baxter protested. “I'll pick you up tomorrow morning at seven, Barbara, and we'll drive to the airport. I don't think we'll be in Washington more than a day.”

At home, Barbara fed Sam and then put him in the car and drove to the Higate Winery in the Napa Valley. It was early afternoon when she arrived, turning off Highway 29 and climbing the dirt road that led to the cluster of old, ivy-covered, stone buildings. A visit to Higate always gave Barbara a feeling of warmth and security. For one thing, it was old, as such things are measured in California. The original stone buildings had been put up by Italian masons in the eighteen seventies and had been added to and refurbished by the Levys. And the warmth of the Levy family made her feel that she was always welcome.

After Barbara had arranged with Eloise to take care of Sam for the next few days, Clair Levy persuaded her to remain at Higate for an early dinner. Sarah Levy, Jake's mother, had sold her big house in Sausalito and was now living with her son and daughter-in-law at Higate. She was at the table with Jake and Clair, Adam and Eloise, Sally, who had come up from Los Angeles with her daughter, and Barbara. Sally's ostensible reason was to allow Sarah to feast her eyes on the infant May Ling, but in all truth, Sally could not bear for Barbara, whom she worshipped, to go to Washington without seeing her.

They sat around the big deal table in Clair's high-ceilinged, beamed, and tiled kitchen, the table heaped with food—platters of fried chicken, bowls of potatoes, asparagus, broccoli, stewed apples, tomatoes, and three kinds of pickles—as if this vast amount of food was a testimony to the existence of normality and sanity. Barbara did not know whether to laugh or weep. She had no idea what Jake Levy had been long ago, but now he was totally a farmer, a big, sunburned man with the farmer's narrow suspicion of and anger at people outside, people in Washington, people who tilled no earth and grew no crop, but sucked the substance of America. The thought of Barbara being handed a subpoena, of Barbara hauled to Washington, of Barbara before an inquisition, enraged him. Clair was calmer but equally indignant.

Strangely, Barbara found herself on the defensive. “Nothing is going to happen to me. In fact, I look forward to the experience. I tell myself that it is part of being a writer, part of the price one pays for the trade. And it's a very positive thing that I am being shaken up a bit. When I take Sammy to Huntington Park and sit there in the sunshine with the young mothers, I begin to forget that any other world exists. So this is good for me, and if I could only get some word from that crazy husband of mine, I would relax and allow myself to be delighted with the experience.”