Читать книгу The Book of Stone - Jonathan Papernick - Страница 10
ОглавлениеAlone in Pinky’s apartment, surrounded by cardboard boxes filled with his father’s most prized possessions, Stone tried to mouth the words of the Kaddish prayer. He hated Seligman for shaming him, especially for the manner in which he had done so—close enough to plant the seed of misery but distant enough to provide no comfort whatsoever. Stone would be reciting the ancient chant only out of guilt; useless obligation, carried along through generations of blood, minted onto his DNA like a brand, the need to soothe the irresistible force tormenting him. But he was not a good son, and could never be a good son. His father was gone—he had missed his chance. Stone could barely form the words of the Kaddish. Burning skeins of acid rose up his throat; his eyes filled with tears. He stopped, trembling in fear, his chest heaving, scarcely human sobs bursting from his open mouth.
Later, after night had fallen, he stared at the boxes that seemed somehow as mysterious as the pyramids of Egypt. Who was his father, after all? Stone knew the broad strokes, the highs and the lows, the triumphs and disgraces, but he did not know why the Judge had been so distant, shattering, in his dismissive treatment of him. He did not understand why he was lionized by so many or what he had still planned to do before the cancer struck him down. An accomplished life, Stone thought, but incomplete.
His father, Walter Joseph Stone, would be forever remembered as the “jurymandering judge,” the New York State Supreme Court justice who had presided over the controversial Court Street Riot trial and been forced to resign over improprieties regarding jury selection. When Stone was younger it had felt like sweet revenge, his father devoured by the hungry media out for blood, but now he was left with nothing but sadness for his father’s tarnished legacy. Stone finished off his joint and mused: Would things have turned out differently if he had, instead of celebrating his father’s disgrace, done something to help ease it?
He knew his father had been born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, son of the notorious gangster Julius Stone. His father had enrolled in Columbia College at the age of fifteen after graduating at the top of his class at Brooklyn Technical High School, and completed Columbia Law School at twenty before becoming the state’s youngest assistant district attorney at the age of twenty-two. He had even been honored by Mayor Robert F. Wagner in a public ceremony for his exceptional service before joining the army’s branch of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps during the Vietnam War.
It was remarkable how different his father was from Julius Stone, reputed trigger man for the crime syndicate Murder Incorporated. It couldn’t have been easy for the Judge to escape Julius’s toxic influence, the violence, the intimidation.
Stone slipped the Judge’s robe on again and closed his eyes: an entire life in thirty-six boxes. He leaned against a stack of boxes, knees pulled to his chest, rolled another joint, and lit it. As the weed took hold of him, Stone knew he wanted to do something, even if it only meant walking down the street to buy a newspaper. He wanted to get up off the ground, to put on clean clothing, to stand up and shout, but his voice would not come. He wanted to do something important, but he was frightened. Stone had even been afraid to open the boxes to learn what was inside—he knew there were old photo albums stacked between the books, photos of him as a child, his father as a young man and then, later, as the force of nature he had become. Perhaps his mother was in those albums as well. He had forgotten what her face looked like; it had been such a long time. Stone wanted to see those faces again, familiar faces in the proper sense, alive with the possibilities of a future they could not imagine.
The first box opened with a sigh, as if the books themselves were glad to be freed from their confinement. Stone stacked them in neat piles along the wall, his fingers blackening with dust. He opened a second and a third box and stacked the books, washing his hands of grime as he went. By the time he had emptied ten or eleven of the boxes, he finally paused, sweating, flipping through a hardcover biography of Orde Wingate, the eccentric British general credited by many with creating modern guerrilla warfare. Something akin to a shiver seized his body; not cold, but electric, as if he had stuck his finger into a light socket. He was not alone. Somebody stood just over his shoulder, reading the words before his eyes, breathing in his ear. “Who’s there?” Stone called and spun around, but there was no one in the room. The books whispered to him. It was a whisper, an actual whisper, but it came from inside Stone’s head. He did not so much read the words as the words read themselves. The Judge had underlined Wingate’s call to arms: “Today we stand on the threshold of battle. The time of preparation is over and we are moving on the enemy to prove ourselves and our methods.”
His father had been reading that book back in the spring when Stone had first arrived. The underlining was new, done with the blue Uni-ball pen Stone had given his father from his knapsack. Stone closed his eyes, and the words remained before him, illuminated, shimmering in the darkness. “I am so fucking high,” he said out loud and began to laugh before he heard four successive gunshots ring out somewhere down the block. He froze in place, waiting for the police to come, but he never heard any sirens.
Stone unboxed The History of Nations—all sixty-eight volumes, reprinted from the London edition, encapsulating the histories of all nations from Greece to Rome to Persia to France to England—his father had bought as a student at an old antiquarian bookshop on 104th Street, according to the stamp inside the cover of the books. More histories: Josephus, Churchill, Thucydides, Gibbon, a three-volume set called History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Biographies of Moses Montefiore and the Rothschilds, the writings of Israel Zangwill and of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, his father’s hero, fluent in eight languages, writer and translator of Dante and Poe, a lawyer by training, a journalist, and above all the most eloquent and forceful voice in Zionism. He found Lincoln; Hitler; Stalin; Machiavelli’s Prince, the pages edged in gold leaf; Clausewitz’s On War in the original German; a signed, personalized copy of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. He found a first edition of Altneuland by Theodor Herzl, published in Leipzig, Germany, and then slim, elegant volumes of the poetry of Ibn Gabirol; the tales of Nachman of Bratslav; the works of Maimonides; the Harvard classics, all fifty-one volumes; Faulkner’s novels; Tolstoy; Dostoevsky; Shakespeare; the Greek tragedies—all rare or first editions in English.
IT WAS HARD to imagine just weeks before his father died, a man had knocked on the door offering to purchase the Judge’s entire estate: his books, papers, furniture, even his clothing. How did this vulture even know the Judge was dying and that his belongings might soon be available? He could have the furniture and clothing, but these books were the Judge’s children after all, more important than Stone had ever been to his father. Stone at least owed him the respect of taking proper care of his books.
It was true, there were ghouls out there looking to make an easy buck, and Stone, under different circumstances, had no objection to making a sale, but the Judge wasn’t really dying, was he? He’d be needing those books before long. He wasn’t dying, he wasn’t. The inexplicable appearance of this shady merchant of misery was enough for Stone to slam the door in the man’s face, but he deftly slid his foot across the threshold and said, “I won’t take but a moment of your time, Mr. Stone.”
This was the first time anyone had ever called him Mr. Stone, and he realized that one day, like it or not, he would be the only Mr. Stone. He opened the door and the man, seeing the living room lined entirely with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, smiled and said, “Quite a collection.” He produced a wad of cash from his pocket. “I’ll give you fifteen grand for everything. Including any personal papers or documents.” He must have been in his early thirties; he was slim and wore a nondescript blue windbreaker and a Mets cap pulled low over his eyes so they were nothing but shadows. He had the makings of a beard on his angular face and did not offer his hand. There was something familiar about him—his greasy arrogance, his presumptuousness—but Stone could not place him. He’d lived too long in the heart of Connecticut and was afraid he’d begun to think that all Jews looked similar.
“Not for sale,” Stone said.
There were no remaining documents, and the books meant everything to his father. When Stone had arrived in the spring and found the Judge’s filing cabinets emptied out, he had asked the Judge what happened, and his father had told him there were no papers, there never were any papers, and to mind his own business. But Stone had found a receipt on the kitchen table from an information management company named Iron Mountain. One afternoon, overcome with curiosity, he had phoned the company only to learn his father’s papers had all been securely shredded.
“Everything is for sale for the right price,” the man insisted, peeling off some more crisp bills. “Think what you can buy with twenty thousand dollars.” He slipped the money into Stone’s hand and it felt like freedom.
Stone considered leaving Brooklyn behind forever, starting out anew on the far side of the world. There was nothing here for him, nothing at all.
“What makes you so sure he’s dying?” Stone asked after a moment.
“Only Hashem knows for certain,” the man said. “But I am making an offer now.”
Stone heard his father stirring in his bed, clicking the morphine drip, and he suddenly felt the violent need for the man to be gone.
“You have to leave,” Stone said, pressing the bills back onto the stranger. “Get out.”
“I’m here to help you.”
“He’s not dying, he’s not dying. He’s not.”
Stone managed to push the man into the hall, but he was certain he heard through the closed door the words, “I’ll be back, Matthew.”
Stone retreated to his father’s room, furious at himself for even considering the money. What kind of son could do such a thing? His father was going to get better, he was going to survive this. But there in his sickbed, his father looked like a stranger, a pale withered husk of what he once was. His eyes were closed and Stone observed movement behind the lids, a sign of life. And then his eyes swung open, icy blue and pitiless, and he said, “You are smart, but not so smart.” After a long pause in which he never removed his eyes from Stone, he added, “Everything is in the books.”
Stone knew for certain his father was calling him through these books. The Judge was gone, but his eyes had tracked these pages, his mind had been shaped by the words written before him. Somebody was in the room with him, just over his shoulder, there but not there, whispering the words in English as they appeared on the pages, overlaid at the same time with that other strange and ancient language. He found a leather-bound copy of One Thousand and One Nights; Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; Rashi’s commentaries; a colossal book on the origins of the Spanish Inquisition; religious texts; legal texts; two books on gematria; the complete works of G. K. Chesterton; a silk-bound copy of Othello, with a tasseled bookmark that tickled Stone’s wrist.
When he finally reached the box in which he had placed the photo albums, Stone took a deep breath, expecting to be consumed by emotion. This was the life behind his own life, a blueprint to himself, which would go a long way toward explaining his future and what he might become. The albums were heavy and bursting with black-and-white pictures of his father as a child on Ocean Parkway: young Walter and poor Aunt Bunny playing on the front lawn, her broad mongoloid face shining beneath a frilled bonnet; his father lacing up a brand-new pair of PF Flyers, the corner of his tongue poking from his mouth in concentration; his father, missing his two front teeth, mugging with a baseball mitt in the stands at Ebbets Field. Stone’s father was small like he was, with a full head of hair and easy smile. He saw his father as a shirtless, happy teen, hair cropped short in the military style, leaning carefree on an oar beside some nameless lake. What an impossible image, that this smiling teen was his father. Stone had rarely seen him smile, and when he did there was a deep cruelty behind his calculating eyes as if he were taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. And then, deeper into the album, something changed in his father: he’d grown into the six-foot-three clean-headed giant that he was, a full six inches taller than Stone had ever grown. What a drastic change he had undergone, from an ordinary midcentury American boy into something almost mythic. He no longer resembled his son in the least—he looked like a different man.
In another album Stone found pictures of himself as a child, at birthday parties, Passover seders, Thanksgiving dinners—all the usual events at which a camera ordinarily appeared to document the moment for posterity. There was nothing unusual about these pictures—he might have been any one of ten million American boys the same age—except nearly every photograph had been defaced. Where Stone’s mother would have been, smiling as he opened his fifth birthday present or crying on his first day of school, there was nothing but a scratched-out spot as if somebody had taken a razor to the glossy sheen and rubbed it down to the raw photographic paper. Again and again his mother had been eliminated from each photograph, scratched out or excised with a pair of scissors, eliminated and thrown down Orwell’s memory hole.
Stone had little sympathy for his mother, who had disappeared without a word when he was twelve years old. But he had hoped he would see in these photographs a family as yet unbroken, happy, ignorant of the future that lay ahead. He wrapped himself in the robe and took a deep draft of the fabric, but instead of his father’s scent all he smelled now was the stink of his own marijuana.
A wrinkled manila envelope slipped out of the back of the album, scattering old scallop-edged black-and-white photos about the floor.
“Papa Julius,” Stone said, snatching up a photo. The Judge had never referred to him by name, but Stone’s mother had insisted her son call him Papa as a sign of respect—an early suggestion of the rift yet to come. The name had felt right on the tip of Stone’s young tongue despite the fact that he had not met the man and was forbidden to speak his name aloud when his father was near.
He was surprised the Judge had kept pictures of Julius; he had not seen him, as far as Stone knew, since he had moved uptown to Columbia over forty years earlier. But there was Stone’s grandfather, faded against the yellowing photographic paper, smiling, his foot on the running board of a black Oldsmobile. Another shot: under the sign for Ratner’s Deli, the Williamsburg Bridge in the background, Julius laughing as he pulled a hat off Meyer Lansky’s half-turned head.
“Meyer fucking Lansky!” Stone said, laughing. “Holy shit!” This was history, he thought, with a flash of pride. He had met his grandfather only once, just before he died, and had been trained by the Judge to act as if he had never existed. But if his grandfather had never existed, it would mean his father had never existed, which in turn would mean that he himself could never have come into being. But Stone was here, and he belonged to them; he’d inherited their genes, shared the same strands of DNA, climbed a similar whirling double helix like a magic ladder to his past and future at the same time.
There were dozens of photos of Julius Stone from his days with Murder Incorporated. Stone studied the photos. His grandfather did not look like a killer. He had intense eyes, sure, but there was a playful glimmer in them, as if he were about to tell a joke. He might have been a vaudeville comedian or a magician with those mischievous eyes. Stone was amazed how similar in build he was to his grandfather, the wild-haired killer, one hundred and twenty pounds of dynamite set with a short fuse.
Stone had to pee and stumbled his way to the bathroom. He caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror as he passed. His image swam in and out of focus as he looked into his own eyes, bloodshot and coated in a sickly film, and saw no sparkle, just pools of sorrow.
A strange thought occurred to Stone as he slipped out of his father’s robe. He looked so much smaller now, pale and gaunt, his body like a plucked bird, like some depilated mammal waiting to be snatched in predatory jaws. But he knew he was not helpless; he stood on the shoulders of two powerful men whom one crossed at one’s own peril. His fingers were slim and tapered—musician’s fingers. He had let his father down giving up on piano as a boy even though he had shown some brilliant sparks of talent. His father had wanted him to be the next Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein, but he had no interest in playing just to please his father, so he quit and never played again. Now, he formed the delicate fingers of his right hand into the shape of a pistol and pointed them at his own image in the mirror. “Reach for the sky, or I’ll fill you full of lead.” Stone laughed for the first time in months, shouting, “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.”
“What the fuck is going on back there?”
Pinky must have returned home while Stone was emptying the boxes. He fell silent, neither shamed nor embarrassed, just irritated he had been interrupted.
Pinky was at the bathroom door, smelling of cheap cologne, his gelled hair brushed forward on his head to form a severe widow’s peak. “I’m telling you, it’s not good for you to be alone right now. I’m buying you a drink.”
“I’m not thirsty,” Stone said.
“My house, my rules. You’re going to drink with me.”
IT WAS A cool September evening, with a soft breeze off the river. Stone’s high was fading fast, his misery rolling back in like a black tide. Somehow he knew leaving the apartment, leaving the books and photographs behind, would lead to his premature destruction. He would be run down by an errant driver, shot by a stickup man, mugged by a neighborhood kid for the lint in his pockets. Nothing good could come of this. They walked in silence past the tangle of graffiti tags on the wall of Pinky’s apartment building. Pinky’s shadow bounced jauntily ahead of Stone’s, his head blackening the paint-scrawled words YOU LIFE IS NOT SO GREAT. Three young black men hung out in front of the Tip-Top Deli and Grocery, crowding the pay phone, waiting for it to ring. They passed a vacant lot and then a small storefront Brotherhood Ministries church where one of the Reverend Randall Roebling Nation’s preachers shouted from a basement pulpit, “Jesus gonna bring ya on home . . .”
Stone could still hear the parishioners clapping their hands and stamping their feet when he and Pinky reached the overpass of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway two blocks away. A livery cab drove past honking its horn, a Puerto Rican flag waving from its antenna.
The whole world was full of static, chaos, random vibrations of noise filling the air to the point of rupturing the invisible seams of the universe. “I need to go home,” Stone said, feeling dizzy. “Before something happens.”
“Nothing is going to happen,” Pinky said. “It’s the weed got you paranoid. Nothing a couple drinks can’t fix.”
“No, listen,” Stone said, “I need to go home. Now.”
Pinky grabbed him roughly by the shoulders and said, “You don’t have a home without me. Remember? A couple drinks, that’s all.”
Under the damp belly of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway they walked with the flow of traffic along the length of a rusted chain-link fence. They turned left at Washington and stepped out from underneath the BQE onto a one-way street that dead-ended a few hundred feet away at the Navy Yard, sleepless Manhattan lit up beyond. This tiny stretch of urban decay looked like the last battlefield of the Industrial Revolution. Forklifts were parked in a crazy array on the sidewalks, some with their silver prongs still raised. Twisted metal lay hunched in piles against the old graffiti-covered warehouses. An oil drum burned on the corner. Despite the late hour, an ice cream truck played a mournful children’s song somewhere in the distance.
For some reason, some presentiment itching at the back of his skull, Stone turned toward the overpass, where he saw, through the glow of the oil drum fire, three figures moving out from under the shadow of the expressway, dressed in black, their hats propped on their heads like smokestacks. He heard garbled mutters of Yiddish. Jesus Christ, he thought, remembering the man who had torn his suit at his father’s funeral. He couldn’t get away from them. Walking through the blighted streets of Pinky’s neighborhood, it was easy to think this was another planet, of graffiti, dice games, institutionalized poverty, and urban decay, but it was still Brooklyn, and Stone realized the farther he got from Midwood, the closer he got to the ultra-Orthodox of Williamsburg.
“Well, this is it,” Pinky said, gesturing like the emcee of some third-rate road show.
A small stairway lit by a single bare bulb led to the basement of a boarded-up redbrick building, remnants of smashed windows shining on the top floors. A stenciled sign on the door read, HIT SIGN. WIN SUIT. Music played from behind a battered steel door.
“How did you find this place?”
“I found it is how I found it,” Pinky said. “After you.”
The Catbird Seat was little more than a repurposed fallout shelter in the basement of an abandoned bottling plant, torched by arsonists in the seventies. The brick walls had been painted in vivid purple and gold and hung with garish abstract paintings bracketed by candelabra fashioned from parts of industrial machinery. They entered the low tin-ceilinged room, blue with cigarette smoke. A group of students, wan artist types, sat laughing around a long table beneath an antique billboard that read, ASTRAL OIL: “SAFE AND BEST.” One of the students had thick sideburns shaped like the state of California. Another wore an army jacket with the word CRASS scrawled in black marker on the back. A girl with blonde pigtails and glitter on her cheeks laughed. The room was lit only by candlelight. Stone took a seat at a small table nearby and noticed in the flickering yellow light the drawn faces of the students. A GREAT INDUSTRIAL CITY, another vintage sign read, and Stone imagined they were the great industrial workers worn down by coal dust, asbestos, ashes, and gas.
“I’ll get you a double from the well,” Pinky said, lighting a cigarette.
This was not a good idea, Stone thought. These people looked like the walking dead themselves. Dry-mouthed, he wished only for a glass of water. Pinky lingered at the bar, leaning close to the red-haired bartender, whispering something that would have been drowned out by the music.
As he sat alone at the table, Stone’s thoughts drifted back to his father, to the funeral, to the horrible sound of the dirt clots rattling against the coffin lid. It was past one in the morning, and the Judge would still be there in the ground, all night long and all the next day, and all winter long, and all year long, and there he would remain, or, at least, his remains would remain, until he was completely forgotten, mourned by no one. The thought was almost too much to bear, and Stone gasped for air. He wanted to go home, but Pinky was already making his way over to the table, a crooked smile on his face.
He slid a glass of clear liquid across the table and raised his own. “L’chaim. To life!” he said, and emptied the glass in a single gulp.
Stone did the same, but whatever rotgut Pinky had brought him rushed back up his throat. He swallowed it again, eyes watering, empty stomach burning. “What the hell is this?”
“Vodka, my man,” Pinky said. “Not the top-shelf stuff, but it does the trick.”
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Stone said.
“You really are a pussy.” Pinky laughed, but Stone didn’t think there was anything funny in Pinky’s words. “Put on your man pants and take it.” When Stone managed to regain his composure, Pinky ruffled Stone’s hair and said, “Straight up, no chaser. That’s the way to do it, my friend.” Pinky was no friend but Stone, hit hard by the double shot of vodka, felt maudlin, the urge to talk overwhelming his desire to leave Pinky and rush back to the relative comfort of his bare mattress.
“Have you ever imagined what happens to you when you die? Really thought deep on it?”
“Honestly?” Pinky said. “No.” He fiddled with his thick gold chain, tucking and untucking it from his New York Jets shirt.
“I was there when he died,” Stone said. “He was there, and then he was not. Something and then nothing. I was with him, and then I was alone. It is almost impossible to understand how one can be and then not be. Do you know what I mean? He was alive. He lived. And now . . .”
“I hear you, brother,” Pinky said. “But seriously.”
“Seriously what?” Stone said.
“I mean, I get it, like life is an illusion and we don’t know if we’re here or we’re not here, like maybe we’re all somebody’s dream or the earth is just some cosmic giant’s ball of snot flying through space and we’re like ants or something just running around like it matters when it don’t. We all die in the end. That is the capital-T truth.”
By the light of the candle, Pinky’s sallow, pasty-white complexion was even more repulsive than it was under the bright light of day. Stone wanted to pity him but he knew the unexamined life was a contented life, and for a moment he wished he could switch places with Pinky to know what it felt like to be a happy idiot preoccupied with only the basest concerns. He stared at Pinky in disgust for a long moment, but he needed to talk, just to hear the words out loud, to make them real, to find a proper place to put his emotions.
“You know he died—just like that. The Judge. His heartbeat was replaced by a rattle in his throat. You know the death rattle is real? And then the rattle stopped. He looked the same at first, except the eyes maybe, but he wasn’t in there. And soon, I don’t know how long, he was just gone. No life at all. Where does it go?” Stone said. “Where does it go?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Pinky said. “You want answers, go see a priest or professor. I’m here to show you a good time.”
“I’m not much of a good-time guy right now,” Stone said, regretting his attempt to open up to Pinky.
“You’ll feel better. Just give it time,” Pinky said, craning his neck around and pointing toward a skinny girl with red, bee-stung lips. “Check out fuck-mouth over there. Why don’t you start with that?”
“I want another drink,” Stone said. He didn’t care what Pinky brought him; he just wanted to be alone again with his thoughts.
“Okay, but the next round is on you,” Pinky said, rising from the table. “I’m just bustin’ your balls. It’s on me, buddy.”
The dark, flickering room pulsed like a heartbeat, bodies pressed so closely together that Pinky was quickly lost to Stone’s view. Every mouth burned like an orange star as cigarettes were drawn and then exhaled. A song by Nico, which Stone had listened to on repeat one weekend with his girlfriend as a freshman at Wesleyan, played from the darkness. It was an acoustic song, sad and beautiful, the simple strumming of the guitar, her voice breaking and dropping, that accent, low and full of disappointment, then rising with hope through the strings. Not ten feet away, a tall skinny girl in a green wool hat and dark sunglasses mouthed the words. Points of ginger hair poked out of the bottom of her hat against her pale cheeks. She was almost flat-chested, wearing loose black peasant pants and a ripped gray cardigan. Stone thought she looked like a boyish elf when she sucked her cheeks in to draw on her cigarette. The girl danced almost without moving, a molasses-slow gyration. Her eyes were closed behind her dark glasses, but she was singing to him.
It would be obscene, vulgar, to pursue a woman now, considering all the things his father would never do again.
“Mind if I join you?”
Stone had not noticed the man approach, and without thinking he told him he was welcome to sit. The bar was packed, after all, and it would have been rude to refuse him a seat. The man wore a suit that looked out of place in the Catbird Seat. He was ten or fifteen years older than Stone and of a trim, sturdy build—he must have been an athlete once. He wore a neat goatee and had an olive complexion with a dark circular birthmark high on his right cheek. His battered nose appeared to have been broken numerous times. His eyes were small and brown and intense. Stone turned away. But the girl was gone now.
“Looks like you blew your chance there.” The man neither smiled nor frowned, his face inscrutable, blank. But there was something in the way he moved as he lit a cigarette off the candle, tilting his neck to one side as if he were working out a kink, which brought him into focus for Stone. The man had been at his father’s funeral, on the grassy knoll, telephoto lens pressed to his face. He had been too far away for Stone to make out his features, but the way he kept stretching his neck was his signature.
“What were you doing at my father’s funeral?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the man said. “I truly am.”
“You’re a journalist?” Stone asked. He didn’t look like the typical rumpled newspaperman. His suit was pressed and neat and his Windsor knot, even at this hour, was still tight and sharp, as if he had just slipped the narrow tie around his neck.
“Let me buy you a drink.”
“I have nothing to say,” Stone said. “And if you think a drink is all it takes to make me dish on my father, you are sadly mistaken.”
“Suit yourself,” the man said, sucking on his cigarette.
Stone scanned the bar for Pinky, wishing he would return with the drinks, but Pinky was nowhere to be seen. Stone thought about picking up and leaving rather than suffer the awkward silence of the stranger. But he was curious. Why had the photographer followed him here if he had just seen him at the cemetery? What could he possibly want?
The man was enjoying the uncomfortable silence as if he knew Stone would be the first to break. He blew some smoke into the air, winked at Stone, and took another long satisfied drag.
“All right,” Stone said at last. “Are you going to tell me who you are?”
Wordlessly, the man placed a small rectangular business card on the table between them. In the top right corner it read: FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATIONS. And then, centered in capital letters: LARRY ZOHAR—SPECIAL AGENT—JOINT TERRORISM TASK FORCE.
The vague uneasiness Stone had been feeling all night gathered in his chest and though he tried to harness his voice to respond, he could not. His premonition of doom had been correct. Stone felt a queasy swirling in his gut. Something big was about to happen, something he was not at all prepared to deal with.
“Now Matthew, let’s be clear,” Zohar said. “You are not in trouble. I just want to ask you a few questions.”
Stone managed to say, “And what if I don’t want to answer?”
Zohar laughed and said, “You have nothing in the world to worry about. I just want to ask you a few simple questions. This is not a big deal. Relax.”
“I have nothing to say about my father.”
“You seem quite certain I’m interested in your father and not you. You see, you’ve already told me something.”
Stone rose from the table, but Zohar grabbed him by the wrist and he sat again. “Maybe you’ll just listen then. Can’t hurt to listen, right?”
Zohar sipped something through a clear straw, placed the glass on the table, and looked Stone in the eyes. “You understand history, you’re well-read, educated, aware. You know the old cliché: those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. There is something to that. You were born the day eleven Israeli athletes were murdered at the Olympic Village in Munich. That’s right, I know your birthday is in six days. Quite a violent welcome to the world. Of course you don’t remember, but you were told later, how your father spent the entire day watching Peter Jennings report on the massacre for ABC, and it wasn’t until the next day, when all the hostages were dead, that he came to see you resting in the maternity ward nursery.”
Stone was still, unmoving. The Judge had not even cared enough to visit his newborn child. Stone did not question how Zohar knew this, because it was consistent with the way his father had behaved his entire life. He tapped a cigarette out of his pack and lit it. His hands were shaking and the smoke failed to calm him.
“You didn’t know he was too preoccupied to see you?” Zohar said. “I’m sorry.”
Stone did all he could not to respond, channeling the strength and will of his father, but he could not restrain himself. “You’re lying.”
“So now we have a dialogue,” Zohar said, smiling. “This is progress.”
“I’m not saying another word.”
“It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? Your father never had time for you. Not even from the beginning.”
“It’s not true.”
“Who can deny it?”
“This is harassment. I’ve done nothing wrong. Can’t you see I’m in mourning?” Stone’s breath grew shallow again, barely pulling the smoke-filled air into his lungs.
“Let me tell you a story,” Zohar said. “To put things in context, so you know where you stand.”
“I don’t need to hear a story from you.”
“Oh, really?” Zohar said. “Did you know your grandfather and Meyer Lansky contributed large sums of money to the Revisionist movement, money which was funneled directly to the paramilitary organization the Irgun, money which paid for the bombing of the King David Hotel?”
“So what? That was a million years ago, if it actually happened. Why are you telling me about my grandfather? I only met the man once. Whatever he did or didn’t do in his twisted life has nothing to do with me.”
“Because this relates to your father,” Zohar said. “You know the saying: like father like son.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Stone responded. “My father upheld the law, fought against organized crime. He was a lawyer and a judge. He hated Julius.”
“Just like you hate your father?”
“I’m not talking about him,” Stone said, his stomach awhirl.
“Your father was also a proud Zionist, a member of the Betar youth group, co-founder and chairman of the Eretz Fund. He served as an advisor to the Israeli Supreme Court, helping to extradite and prosecute suspected Nazi war criminals, most notably John Demjanjuk, thought to be the infamous Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp. Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 and sentenced to death. The sentence was later overturned as the Israeli Supreme Court rescinded its earlier judgment and returned Demjanjuk to the United States, citing misconduct on the part of overzealous prosecutors.”
“I see where this is going,” Stone said, overcome with rage at this callous intrusion into his most private grief. “And I’ve heard more than enough. Can’t you at least show some humanity and let me mourn in peace?”
Stone pushed back his chair from the table and stood up. Run, run, he thought. But his legs had gone numb and he waded into the swelling crowd of hipsters. Stone brushed past the skinny girl who had been singing to him, and she said, “Don’t look so sad, darling. Life is crazy for everyone.”
Zohar followed him, hot breath at his ear. “During the infamous Court Street Riot trial, your father’s impartiality was impugned again when he allowed a member of the jury who was sympathetic to the killer Isaac Brilliant to stay on after the Judge became aware of the juror’s own anti-Arab sympathies. There is no doubt Brilliant killed the sixty-three-year-old Palestinian-born shopkeeper Nasser Al-Bassam. There is even video of him bashing the man’s head in with a brick. Yet Brilliant went free.”
He was going to lose his mind, Stone thought, wrenching his arm from Zohar’s grip and making for the exit.
“Your father was always trying to destroy those he considered his enemies. He was a punitive, spiteful man with a biblical hunger for revenge. Let me tell you, he was no better than Julius Stone.”
“That’s enough,” Stone said, bursting out the door and into the street, his voice wracked with broken sobs. He was prepared never to speak a word aloud again.
“Tell me one thing,” Zohar persisted. “That warehouse across the street. Are you familiar with the Crown of Solomon Talmudical Academy? Weren’t you on your way there tonight? Don’t lie to me, Matthew.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“It may be a legitimate Torah school, but I know the organization your father ran funds one hundred percent of its operation.”
“I can’t help you,” Stone said, his mind blank with panic.
“Matthew, I have reason to believe the school is a front for a terrorist cell connected to your father’s former colleague Rabbi Zalman Seligman. People’s lives may be at stake,” Zohar said, grabbing Stone by the shirt, his sour breath turning Stone’s stomach. “I need to know what is going on inside there.”
“This interrogation is over.” Stone tore himself from Zohar’s grip and sprinted up the street at a dead run.
