Establishment (3 page)

“They want to ask questions about Barbara,” Eloise told him.

Jake joined them in time to hear this, and he said to the two men, “Just who the devil are you?”

They showed him their credentials and began to introduce themselves, very restrained, very correct.

“I don't want to know your goddamn names,” Jake interrupted. “You're trespassing. You're on private property, uninvited. So I would ask you to get to hell out of here and off my property.”

“That's a surprising attitude to take, Mr. Levy,” Williams said. “You act as if you don't know what's going on in this country today, which is very unlikely, or as if you're a part of it.”

“What! What in hell are you saying? Are you calling me a communist?”

“The term is yours, not mine.”

Jake grinned. “You guys are dolls, aren't you? The last time I had any of you on my place was in nineteen twenty-two. You called yourselves prohibition agents then. In my book, you're still prohibition agents. So get off my land, and get off quickly.”

“That's your last word, Mr. Levy?”

“That's my last word, sonny.”

They walked back to their car and drove off. Adam watched them, a worried look on his face. “Do you think that was wise?” he asked his father.

“They turn my stomach.”

“Why are they investigating Barbara?” Eloise asked.

Adam shook his head. “Communists,” Jake said in disgust.

***

The next day, Bernie met with Brodsky and Goodman at Gino's restaurant on Jones Street. It was the first time in months that Bernie had broken the routine of a sandwich and a container of coffee in his office in the garage. He felt liberated. Just to sit in the little Italian restaurant within sight of the bay was an exciting and exhilarating experience. He had freed himself from the work that was piling up at the garage. Suddenly, he didn't care. All morning he had fed himself with inner dialogues concerning his relationship with Barbara, his love of Barbara, his resentment of Barbara. Before he left the house, having coffee in the kitchen, he had watched her as she put the breakfast things on the table. She wore a pale blue housecoat, a simple thing of light wool, but she carried it with the grace of an evening gown. No make-up, but then, she rarely used make-up. Her honey-colored hair had been hastily combed, and it fell in light, easy waves around her head. Her wide gray eyes met his occasionally, but without accusation or anger. He knew her that well. She had it out with herself, and now there would be no more arguments or recriminations. It was up to him, and her silent presence was the most telling argument she could present. It wasn't that she was simply a beautiful woman; she was the most remarkable and exciting woman he had ever known. People reacted to her carriage, her manner, her forthrightness, and the feeling of compassion that she conveyed without ever becoming sentimental.

It was this that Bernie found most difficult to deal with. Without realizing it, he had been drawn to Barbara because of her wholeness; he himself was fragmented, an orphaned boy pleading for love and security, a Jew who could only live with his Jewishness by committing himself to a dream of Palestine when he was still a boy, enlisting in the International Brigade in Spain to learn a game of war, then living the game for seven endless years. He never acknowledged that he was a mercenary soldier. “I am not a killer,” he had once pleaded to Barbara, which was quite true, yet for seven years he had practiced and mastered the art of killing. “You can't condemn soldiers,” he had argued with Barbara. “We did what we had to do.” She had accepted that.

Men did what they had to do; it was the only explanation they could offer themselves.

Bernie said to Brodsky, “I'm in this, believe it.” Brodsky wasn't sure. Goodman was absorbed in a mound of spaghetti that he was wolfing down.

“I need you, Bernie,” Brodsky said. “This operation has become so big and so complex that it's driving me up the wall. Just go find ten Jewish pilots who can fly four-motor planes and who are willing to dump their jobs and go off on this kind of caper. I couldn't. I found seven Jews.”

“What about the rest?”

“Two Irish and an Italian. I'm worried about the Italian, a guy named Massetti. He flew in the Italian air force, and he swears he's got a Jewish grandmother. He wants to atone for Mussolini. I think he's maybe O.K., but I don't think he ever flew a four-motor job before. With navigators, it's worse. I only have four, and that means we'll have to fly formation. We don't have copilots. Bernie, you're sure you can't fly a plane?”

“I'm sure.”

“Back in thirty-nine, the decision was that you'd enlist and learn to fly.”

“We've been through that. They put me in the infantry. Now where are these pilots?”

“That's another thing. We got them down in a hotel in Hollywood, and four of the Haganah boys are with them. How long we can hold them there is a question. One of the Irishmen, McClosky, is a drunk, and it's a question of getting out of there before he drinks himself to death. Herbie's going back down there today. For Christ's sake,” he said to Goodman, “will you stop eating and pay some attention?”

Goodman paused over a fork of spaghetti, a hurt look on his round face. “I'm listening.”

“And this guy who has the planes,” Brodsky went on. “He's some kind of nut. He says he has an offer from a South American airline to buy the planes for a quarter of a million, but he wants to sell to us because God told him that until the Jews return to the promised land, there'll be no peace on earth. That's what he says. Me, I think he can't get an export license, and I'm not even sure of how he got hold of the planes. There is plenty of hanky-panky in this war surplus stuff.”

“Did you see the planes?” Bernie asked.

“We saw them. Herbie here thinks they're O.K.”

“Are you a pilot?”

“Navigator,” Herbie replied. “I was with the Tenth Air Force.”

“And what about an export license? Can you get one?”

“Hell, no,” Brodsky said. “This whole thing is illegal. If just a smell of it gets out, we're cooked.”

“Then how in hell do you expect to get the planes out of the country?”

“Simple. We fly them out. We got a guy in Bakersfield who deals in aviation gasoline, and he says he can get us the trucks to fuel them. He's Jewish, and he's willing to stake us to the fuel. We got another guy in New Jersey, name of Schullman, who runs an airfield for private planes and freighters. He's willing to look the other way. We fly the planes cross-country and try to match the commercial airlines, land in New Jersey, refuel, and take off.”

“For where?”

“We don't know yet. But we got guys in New York working on it.”

“I guess you realize what a harebrained scheme this whole thing is,” Bernie said.

“Sure. But what the hell. Everything we do in Palestine is either harebrained or impossible. So we do it. We can muster maybe forty thousand men in the Haganah. We can't even arm all of them. We don't have one plane that's worth talking about. And any day now, we're going to be facing a hundred and fifty thousand Arab troops, real armies with tanks and guns and planes. Do you understand how much we need a guy like you, Bernie. From what I hear, you were one of the best weapons men the British had in Africa—”

“Bullshit.”

“Sure. Still, you know your stuff. You got a command personality. You could hold this crew in line—”

“Can it. I'll go.”

“Bernie, thanks. Now about the money?”

“I'll try. The thing I don't understand is, why can't you go to regular sources? There are plenty of wealthy Jews here and in Los Angeles. They'll give.”

“Will they, Bernie? You can't report this kind of money. You can't claim a deduction. Getting the two million in New York was like pulling teeth out of granite. It took seven months. We can't involve any of the fund-raisers who raise money for Palestine. We can't take chances on questions being asked. It's not simple, and our time is running out.”

***

Jean Whittier, Barbara's mother, had begun life as Jean Seldon, whose father, Thomas Seldon, had founded the Seldon Bank, which already had sixteen branches in California. In the state, the Seldon Bank was second only to the giant Bank of America. Control of the bank had passed to her son, Thomas, and at this time Jean was living in a rather placid sort of unmarried sinfulness with her first husband, Dan Lavette. The legalistic complications caused her to retain the name of Whittier, her previous husband; as she put it, it would have been rather pointless to live unmarried with a man whose name was identical with her own. She and Dan made their residence in the top floor of the house on Russian Hill that Dan had built for her thirty-five years before, soon after their marriage. Jean had converted the ground floor into the gallery through which she was none too successfully attempting to bring to the citizens of San Francisco an appreciation of modern art. Just now, in the gallery, the doors temporarily closed to the public, Jean had forgathered with Eloise and Adam Levy, her daughter, Barbara, and on Barbara's lap her grandson, Sam, who was determinedly attempting to destroy his thumb with his eight rudimentary teeth.

“I would give him a pacifier,” Jean was saying. “I don't think all that is good for his thumb.”

“I know, mother,” Barbara said. “I forgot it. I dashed out of the house, wondering what awful thing had transpired.”

“It is awful,” Eloise said. “It's dreadful.”

“I don't think it's dreadful at all. Two FBI men were asking about me. The way things are today, with everyone seeing communists behind every bush and wall, they must be asking questions about thousands and thousands of people. It's what they're paid for. I only wish Jake hadn't been so high-handed with them. Then you might have found out what they were after.”

“Jake is Jake,” Adam said. “I was pretty damn angry myself. It's the whole look and attitude of them. They're such cold, malignant bastards. And why Eloise? Why do they come to her?”

“Probably because it's easier to bully a woman than a man,” Barbara decided.

“Could it have had something to do with Bernie?” Jean wondered.

“Why Bernie?”

“Well, I only mean he has that kind of a past, hasn't he? Spain, Palestine, smuggling, then the British army. I never did understand what he did during those years.”

“He did what most people were doing. He fought fascism.”

“Which is not exactly popular these days.”

“I think you are all making too much of this. I have nothing to hide and nothing to conceal,” Barbara said firmly—asking herself at the same time whether there was any truth in her statement. In fact, she had a good deal to conceal, and she was not very good at dissembling. It was close to lunchtime, and Jean suggested that Adam take Eloise to have seafood on the wharf and that they both take the afternoon in town.

When Barbara rose to go, Jean said, “I'd rather you remained. I have oatmeal and applesauce and all sorts of things to feed Sam, and you and I will talk.”

“I'd rather not, mother.”

“I'd rather you would.”

Barbara sighed and nodded. Adam and Eloise left. “You're very arrogant, mother,” Barbara said. “You order people around. You tell them what to do and where to go, and you treat grown folk like children.”

“I know. At the same time, we're going to talk. I know you very well, my dear, and I'm not going to lie awake wondering what's happening in your life.”

“You never have.”

“That's as it may be. Suppose we put together some lunch for your son.”

While she fed Sam, Barbara told Jean what had happened between her and Bernie. “I'm trusting you,” Barbara said. “It's no matter-of-fact thing to trust one's mother with stuff like this. I do trust you. They would be in terrible trouble if this got out.”

“And you think that's why the FBI was asking about you?”

“No, I don't. It's just too soon, and if they were, why wouldn't they ask about Bernie instead of me?”

“I don't know. Bobby,” Jean said, “what does it all add up to? Does he want to leave you? Is this crazy scheme an excuse?”

“Anything would be an excuse. It isn't that he doesn't love me. I think he loves me as much as he could love anyone. He's as gentle as a lamb, and you watch him playing with Sammy and you say to yourself, what a happy, darling man—and content. No, he's not content. He's eating out his heart.”

“For what? To be in Palestine?”

“That could be what he tells himself. But it's not that. It's to be free, to run after that macho image of a big, heroic man. Oh, maybe not. I don't really know what tortures his soul. He once asked me why I kept publishing my books under the name of Barbara Lavette. Was I ashamed of the name of Cohen? Can you imagine? I tried to make him understand that a writer's name is like a trademark, a record of the work she has done. But the plain fact is that we live on the money I earn. He's so aware of that. Every cent the garage makes goes to paying off his loans and paying the mortgage fees, and he is damn well aware that I clean the house and cook the meals and take care of Sammy and do my own writing as well.”

“And how you do it, I can't for the life of me imagine.”

“It's no great problem. I have enough time. But I know what it does to him. I've watched the marriage going to pieces for months, and it breaks my heart. He's not cruel or nasty or vicious. He's just dying inside himself, and it's my fault because if I had had an ounce of common sense, I wouldn't have married him. The funny part of it is that I love him so much, almost the way I love Sammy, the way you love a child. You don't know a man until you're in bed with him, and then you know him the way no one else does. And you know, if I plead with him enough I can stop him, I can keep him from going.”