Lieberman's Law (11 page)

They hung up. In this room were ghosts, even the ghost of the man he had murdered, the madman with the gun, Frankie Kraylaw, who Hanrahan had set up before the man could kill his own wife and little boy.

Hanrahan stood up. It was time to leave the ghosts. He'd sell and send half the money to Maureen, though the house was in his name and she had not asked for it in their quick civil divorce. She had asked for no money and no support, wanting none, knowing that Hanrahan probably wouldn't have it even if the court ordered him to pay. She wanted all chains cut. They had paid off the house years ago. She deserved half. He thought she'd keep it, but she might send it back to him.

What had brought all this back? The sight of destruction, anger borne of a hatred Hanrahan could not understand. He had simply stood there while the Skokie police and the FBI had gone over the chapel. He had read the signs, seen the destruction.

He really needed a drink. He called Smedley Ash, who answered after three rings. “Smed? It's Bill Hanrahan. The bottle's calling.”

Smedley Ash was an alcoholic. He had been sober for a decade. Ironically, Bill Hanrahan had arrested Smedley on two occasions for disorderly conduct. Now Smedley was sober and working as the manager of the Now Boutique on Oak Street. Smedley was quietly but proudly gay.

“What happened?” Smedley asked.

Hanrahan rambled for about ten minutes about Maureen, his kids, what he had seen earlier that day, Iris.

“I'll be right over,” said Smedley.

Hanrahan sighed. “No,” he said. “It's passing and I've got to get to work. I just needed to let it out. I don't even know what it is.”

“OK,” said Smedley. “I'll give you a call later, maybe we can talk after work.”

Hanrahan thanked him and hung up. He put on his shoes, checked his gun, holstered it, put on his jacket, and headed for the door. The phone rang. Hanrahan considered ignoring it, but he had no answering machine, and he picked it up.

“Bill?” came a woman's voice.

“It's me,” he said. “Bess?”

“Yes,” she said, trying to speak calmly and evenly. “I've got to find Abe. Someone threatened to kill us, came right up to Barry when he was playing baseball in the park, said he'd kill us if Abe didn't leave him alone.”

“How's Barry?”

“Considering, he's all right. Scared but all right. I didn't tell Melisa. Find Abe.”

“I'll find him,” said Hanrahan. “Did Barry describe the man? Would he recognize him again if he saw him?”

“I don't think so,” said Bess. “Maybe. He wore a raincoat and dark glasses. He was Chinese.”

Hanrahan paused. Or Korean, he thought.

“I don't know,” Bess said. “I woke up this morning and the world went crazy. Fanatics deface my synagogue, lunatics threaten my family.”

Hanrahan knew the feeling.

The phone rang.

Barry was in the kitchen drinking chocolate milk and eating Oreo cookies. Melisa was in the living room watching something about manatees on the Discovery Channel. Melisa had asked if she could go down the street and play with Sarah Horowitz. Bess, who desperately wanted a shower because she was covered in paint and reeked of filth from the start of the cleanup at the temple, said no. She wanted them together, in the house. Melisa had asked why she couldn't play. Bess said that she needed her granddaughter's help in making cookies. It was a weak excuse, but Melisa didn't question it and was soon absorbed in the manatees.

The phone rang again. She picked it up automatically, expecting an Asian voice, the repeat of the threat and warning that had been given to Barry. It turned out to be almost as bad.

“Bess?” asked Lisa.

“Yes.”

“Are you all right, the kids, Abe?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I don't know. I just had a feeling.”

California was doing something to Lisa. Bess wasn't sure whether it was good or bad. Lisa, her biochemist daughter, who showed little affection and no capacity for or interest in intuition, was on the phone showing concern for something she didn't even know had happened.

“Well, everything is fine. How are you?”

“Making it,” Lisa said seriously.

After she first left her husband, Todd, he had pressed for months for her and the children to return. He'd finally given up. At the very moment that Lisa had finally considered a return to her husband, Todd had taken up with another professor in his department, a woman ten years older than he and, what was worse, a woman Lisa liked. And so they divorced and Lisa had left her children with Bess and Abe, and had taken off for California with the idea of settling and sending for the children.

“Good,” said Bess, aware of her reeking dirty clothes. “Would you like to talk to Melisa?”

“Yes, and Barry.”

“Barry isn't here,” said Bess, eyes closed as she lied. “He has a ball game at the J.”

“Then Melisa.”

“Lisa?”

“Yes?”

“We love you. Your father and I.”

“I know,” she said. “And since I know I'm not lovable, I'm beginning to appreciate it. Bess, I'm seeing someone.”

“Is it serious?” asked Bess.

“Very,” said Lisa.

Melisa, having heard part of the conversation during a commercial, ran to the phone and took it from her grandmother.

“Mom?”

“Yes, Missy. How are you?”

“OK. Did you know manatees are almost extinct?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that grandma's temple was torn up by Nazis?”

“Torn up by …” Lisa said with a gasp.

“They wrote things on the walls and everything. Grandma helped clean up. She's still wearing smelly clothes. We're going to order Domino's pizzas delivered. I've got a tape of
Lion King.
When are Barry and I going to California?”

“You want to come to California?”

“I guess. Maybe not. It doesn't get cold there, does it?”

“Not very. I'll talk to you again soon. Tell Barry I called.”

“You can talk to him. He's in the kitchen all muddy eating cookies.”

“Put Grandma back on.”

Melisa handed the phone to Bess and returned to the television set.

“What is happening?” Lisa said even more calmly than usual.

Bess sighed and told her from beginning to the present. Then she said, “Lisa? Are you there?”

“I'm here, Mother,” Lisa said. Lisa rarely called her mother and father anything but Bess and Abe. It was a sign, but of what Bess was not certain. “I think I may take the children now,” Lisa said.

“It's the middle of the semester,” Bess said. “Barry's about to have his bar mitzvah.”

“It's the beginning of their lives,” Lisa answered. “They'll be safe with me.”

“Los Angeles is safer than Chicago?” asked Bess.

“It is where I live,” she said. “And I don't live in a house with a policeman whose family gets threatened because he deals with lunatics, drug dealers, gangs, and killers.”

“Lisa,” Bess pleaded. “You've got a full-time job. You couldn't even be home for them after school. And the cost of day care …”

“Mother, I …”

“Lisa,” said Bess. “I'm too dirty, too depressed, and too tired to do anything but tell you the truth, a truth you and I both know.”

She looked back to see if the children could hear. Melisa was already back in the living room. Barry had left the kitchen.

“The truth is, Lisa, you don't want the children. You'll come here, take them, uproot them, put them in after-school programs, and regret the nights you have to deal with their growing up.”

“Which means,” said Lisa evenly, “you don't think I've grown up.”

“That's part of it,” said Bess wearily.

Lisa hung up the phone.

I
BRAHAM SAID LOOKED AT LIEBERMAN
who looked back at him. The message was clear. Said knew the beautiful young woman with the long, dark hair who was speaking to the crowd, and was suggesting that she might well be the one for whom they were looking.

“Listen,” the woman said holding up her hand for quiet. “Listen, for the sake of the dead, for the sake of those who have died for a homeland for their children, for the sake of justice.”

The crowd grew quiet and paid attention. A muscular young man with blond curly hair stood with his arms folded, shaking his head. He had heard this before.

“Her name is Jara,” Ibraham whispered. “Jara Mohammed. One of the most militant of the Arab Student Response Committee. Her younger brother, Massad, is probably around someplace.”

Lieberman didn't bother to turn around. He knew a police photographer was getting the woman's picture, a picture Lieberman could show to Anne Ready, the old woman who lived across from Mir Shavot.

“Three of our people died yesterday,” the woman said, holding up three long fingers and snapping them down one at a time. “No more than a half-mile from where we now stand arguing. If we are not strong, the Jews like this one …” She pointed at the muscular young man with folded arms, “will slaughter us as they have slaughtered us for five thousand years.”

“A body count?” the muscular young blond man said suddenly, shouting, angry, his hands held out. “I am an Israeli. I have seen body counts. I've been in the army on military patrols and seen the bodies of slaughtered Jewish children in a school bus. The numbers of our dead civilians, our children, our mothers is part of the attempt throughout history to eliminate the Jews and a Jewish State. The Nazis, the Arabs, the British have all tried and failed. They looked behind themselves and there was their dark shadow and they called it Jew and tried to destroy it, but you can't destroy your shadow. Never.” There were some shouts of approval from the crowd and other shouts and insults aimed at the young Israeli.

Lieberman knew the quadrangle of the University of Chicago well. Standing at the rear entrance to the Administration Building with Said at his side, Lieberman watched and listened and remembered. Twenty-five years ago, he had stood in about the same spot just off the grass. He had looked around at the matched, heavy gray stone buildings that made the university look English, ancient, and serious.

Two and a half decades ago, the Weathermen, primarily a group of university students, had protested the war in Vietnam at a massive rally right where Abe now stood. With bullhorns, intelligence, hate, and paranoia, they had rallied a few hundred students into a boycott of classes and a take-over of the Administration Building, a sit-in until demands were met including the university's pulling out all its investments in unacceptable companies and unacceptable countries. The targets were the U.S. government, South Africa, chemical companies. The students wanted change.

Lieberman had been assigned to that protest. Even at thirty-five he looked at least fifty and was taken for a professor by most of the students. One of the Weathermen, a young man with long hair and skin as clear as a model's, had approached Lieberman and asked, “Are you with us or against us?”

Lieberman had answered that he hadn't chosen sides.

“Then you're against us,” said the young man. “Don't you know what's going on here?”

“A hundred or so students,” said Lieberman, “are going to go into that building and sit around making demands, getting their pictures in the paper, going to jail, accomplishing very little.”

“Then we'll think of something bigger,” said the young man with great sincerity. “Ask him. He knows.” The “him” who supposedly knew was a black photographer named Jim Cooper who had been hired by the university to take pictures of the crowd so that leaders could be identified and later expelled. The young man who had pointed to him certainly did not know that Cooper was employed by the university the young man was attacking.

Jim was philosophical about the matter. He was older than Lieberman and had been through two wars carrying a camera. Now he made a living freelancing and shaking his head at all people who carried banners, made threats, and assumed he was one of them because of the color of his skin. Jim had told Lieberman over a beer at a bar on 57th Street that these were middle-class and rich white kids, smart, and feeling guilty because they weren't black and poor and hadn't had to live with hate and poverty and despair. “Headlines and a few busted heads,” said Jim.

Lieberman had nodded, looking around the tavern at students and faculty slowly downing beers and eating cheeseburgers.

Lieberman and Jim Cooper had stayed in touch over the years. Cooper had opened a studio just north of the Loop on Wells Street and had succeeded in making a living by doing everything from portraits to car collisions. But his big break came only a few years ago when he developed a secret process for printing color photos, mostly of musicians, so they came out looking like eerie suggestions of life, abstract disturbing forms. Jim won prizes, had articles written about him and his work, and actually sold most of his work at a price that kept him and his wife comfortable. So, given the fact that Jim Cooper was a success and was at least seventy it was no little surprise today for Lieberman to see Cooper, hair completely white, a slight stoop to his shoulders, standing at the fringe of the growing crowd, taking pictures with a telephoto lens, a black bag slung over his shoulder.

A thin young man was the next to speak. He had conviction. He had zeal. He also had a pair of glasses that he had to keep on his nose with an occasional squint. He had no charisma.

Lieberman told Said he would be right back and moved toward Jim Cooper who greeted him with a smile and a handshake. “What the hell are you doing here?” Lieberman asked.

“Last time I was here for something like this,” said Cooper, “I felt something. I couldn't get it in the photographs, the hate, confusion, the colors of anger and fear, the shapes. No, Abraham, this time I'm here for me.”