The Fire This Time

by S. Frederic Liss

  “What do you really know of faith?” he replied. “Words in a sermon?”

  To which those rabbis said, “Where was the Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh. who stayed Abraham’s hand and parted the Red Sea? Whose fire did not consume the bush? Who handed down the tablets to Moses? Was the Covenant a tease? Or, worse, a bait and switch? Why did His chosen people cower in fetid jail cells while those who would destroy them, annihilate them, enjoy the pleasures of their indulgences? When life itself became the lesson, nothing good follows.”

  Unbeknownst to the rabbi, his faith had been imprisoned in the same black hole as his memories of his personal experiences during the Nazi era. On the boat crossing the Atlantic, he had flipped the coin of Pascal’s wager. Now, years later, he still waited for it to land. Heads or tails? Or, on its edge? He doubted it made a difference.

  From the shadows of the overpass, a voice still and small emanated. “Spare some change? Please, mister. I’s starving.”

  A black youth stepped out of the shadows. Dirt streaked his face. He wore a faded tee shirt freckled with bleach stains, over his heart a Trojan horse in silhouette. His pants were rolled up at the cuffs. The soles of his sneakers flapped as he walked.

  “Please, mister. I needin’ eats bad.”

  The rabbi’s thumb pierced the foil and a wisp of steam escaped. He wished he had two plates. “Wait here. When I come back, I’ll buy you something to eat.”

  “No feedin’ bloodsuckers.” The boy punched at the plate. The rabbi twisted sideways to deflect the blow, absorbing it in his forearm. The plate tottered and the rabbi grabbed it with his other hand so it wouldn’t fall. The boy kicked at the rabbi’s shins. The rabbi curved his body over the plate as if it were an infant he was protecting from a sudden storm. The boy made guns out of his fingers and thumbs, then shouted, “Next time, you be wasted.” The boy vaulted down the stairs two at a time and jumped into a waiting car.

  The rabbi leaned on the railing and recited the Shema. It pained him to see so much hatred in someone so young. In an adult, he understood; but to pass it on to an innocent youth was a sin worse than violating the laws of Kashreit.

  In the visitor’s lobby of the Charles Street Jail, he stared at the barred windows. They reminded him of the ticket windows of a train station. After the war, he had traveled by train across Europe to London to catch a boat to New York. The bell to the left of the window reminded him of the clerk who refused to sell him a ticket because he had arrived a minute after the ticket window had closed for the day. The steam hissing out of the radiators reminded him of the locomotive pulling the train he had missed because he didn’t have a ticket. But, the hollow voice that growled at him from the speaker mounted on the wall above the lobby door, that voice he had heard before. Where he had heard it, he did not remember. What it had said, he did not remember.

  “Identify yourself and state your business.”

  “Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben with a kosher meal for Avram Levy.” A door sprung open and he entered a large room, empty except for a table and one chair. An unshielded bulb bathed the room with a light that burnished the hard metallic surfaces of the table and chair in a hard glare. A second bulb flickered randomly as if it were trying to communicate a message in code.

  He placed Avram’s dinner on the table and waited. He had waited in a room like this before, an interview room at the Port of New York for questioning by immigration officers while the authenticity of his travel documents was verified. Yet, this room had a vague resemblance to some other room he had once waited in. He closed his eyes, but all he saw was the dark. He wished his mind would stop playing tricks on him.

  Finally, a door labeled ‘Welcome’ opened and two prison guards in drab brown uniforms entered. One searched him while the other, acting as if he expected a bomb, removed the foil from the plate and poked through the food with the stub of a pencil. The boiled chicken, overcooked as the rabbi always prepared it, fell away from the bone and settled on the rice and sweet potato. The challah now had the guard’s thumbprint in its center.

  “I got the knife and fork,” said the guard whose name tag was taped over.

  “Strip,” said the other. He did not wear a tag.

  “Never before. Why now?”

  “Strip. Don’t strip. I don’t give a fuck, but you wanna see the Jew, you strip.”

  ‘The Jew’, the rabbi thought, as he undressed. First, bloodsucker; now, the Jew. That’s how it starts. Turning a person into a thing. He felt chilled in spite of the heat. Now, as he removed his shirt, he started shaking and did not stop while the prison guards, laughing and joking, searched for contraband. In all his previous visits to other inmates never had the search for contraband been anything more than a perfunctory pat-down, fully clothed. Why, he wanted to ask; but he knew what the answer would be.

  “Looking for lice,” one of the guards said.

  Lice. For years, the rabbi had been so paranoid about head lice that he shampooed his hair several times a day, something he still did. Obsessive-compulsive behavior, a psychologist once told him. Where does it come from? he had asked. Something in your past, the psychologist had replied. Nothing that I remember, the rabbi had said. Acting out is a form of remembering without actually remembering, said the psychologist. The rabbi did not ask for an explanation because he knew he would not understand it.

  Now the rabbi dressed and both guards, one by his side, the other behind him carrying Levy’s dinner, escorted him to the visiting area where he was seated behind a bullet-proof partition that divided the room. The guard with the dinner appeared on the other side. “Five minutes,” the guard who remained by his side said. “I’ll be here, he’ll be there.”

  “The statutory privilege,” Rabbi ben Reuben said, “between clergy and . . . ”

  “You being here’s a fucking privilege.”

  On the other side of the barrier, Levy entered and sagged into the chair opposite the rabbi. He scooped his dinner with his fingers, eating like a young child breaking the Yom Kippur fast. Kernels of rice and shreds of chicken and bits of sweet potato clung to the stubble of his beard. Watching him eat, the rabbi wanted to ask him if he did it, but he knew better than doing so in the presence of the guards. Their presence nullified the clergy privilege granted by Massachusetts law to conversations between rabbis and their congregants.

  “Jacob and I met with Attorney Maddie Devlin.”

  “She’s traif.”

  Levy’s vehemence surprised the rabbi. The guard on Levy’s side of the partition smirked and shook his head.

  “She desecrates the Sabbath.” Levy tried to rise, but the guard shoved him back into his chair.

  “Try that again,” the guard said, “and dinner’s kaput.”

  “She does not dress modestly. She does not wear a wig. She is not my Esther.”

  “Jacob has tried a few cases in his day. He’ll keep an eye on her.”

  “And if Hashem should strike him blind?”

  “Then he will see with his ears.”

  “Traif,” Levy repeated.

  “Time.” The guard put his hand on the rabbi’s shoulder.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow to conduct a havdalah service.”

  “Yizkor would be more appropriate.”

  The Rabbi shivered as he crossed the footbridge over the Charles Street rotary. He searched the street below for the car the boy had jumped into, the shadows for the boy himself. Who’s watching me? Why? He knew who; he knew why. He feared for his future, for the future. Fear was the price of being a survivor. No one spied on the defeated or the conquered, the dying or the dead; they spied on the living, on the fighters, on those who refused to concede the struggle. America had dulled his fear, had deadened him. Now, for the first time since he immigrated to America, he felt alive. Now, he knew better. Silently, he offered a toast, l’chaim. To life.

  CHAPTER 2

  SATURDAY, APRIL 11, 1981

  -1-

  Maddie Devlin spread her morning newspaper across the tab
le in the back corner booth at Behan’s, a crowded Southie railroad diner that served green eggs and ham on St. Patrick’s Day and decorated its walls with prints of Irish heroes of the Risings, Easter 1798, 1867, Easter 1916, the rebellions before and after, those in between. For the children there were drawings of the Lorax and other Dr. Seuss characters with a bit more of the tricolors of the Irish flag than in the original illustrations. Behan’s was a neighborhood place where everyone knew everyone, a place where people knew not to wear orange whether on St. Patrick’s Day or any other day, a place where Sanka was banished because of the color of its packaging, a place with an unlisted phone number, a place whose neon sign–green, of course–said merely Good Eats Cheap.

  On Saturdays and Sundays, people lined up from the door, down the steps to the sidewalk, past the newsstand and candy store, past the Convent of the Sisters of Notre Dame, to the bus stop, and beyond, willing to wait because the line at Behan’s was as much a social gathering place as any of Southie’s churches, clubs, baseball diamonds, or bars. Brendan, the owner’s son, sat singles and doubles European style, claiming credit for more than one introduction that culminated in marriage. He kept an album of wedding pictures by the cash register and celebrated anniversaries, christenings, first communions, with dinner on the house. Those who wanted to eat alone sat at the counter on stools that swiveled a full three hundred sixty degrees. Children played spin the top on those stools and more than one gave back the food he had just eaten. It was one of the many quirks which made Behan’s Behan’s.

  Maddie had taken a counter seat, but when the people on either side carried their breakfasts to other stools, Brendan led her to the back-corner booth, the last booth before the door to the rest rooms. He whispered something in Gaelic which she understood to be a curse she would not be welcome back even though she did not speak the language. On this combustible Saturday, people who on previous Saturdays would have smiled a greeting, welcomed her to join them, or joined her, now looked straight ahead on the way to or from the rest-rooms as if glancing at her would turn them into pillars of salt or mounds of ash.

  Maddie, Charles F. Sullivan, III, and Avram Levy, dominated Saturday’s Boston Globe, five of the six front-page stories, the odd one devoted to the heat wave, two of the three front-page photographs, the third a heat wave photo. Articles and photos filled three inside pages; on page three, a paparazzi ambush picture taken as she snuck out the service entrance of the court-house after Levy’s arraignment. Her name also monopolized the editorial page, two editorials, one preaching the Constitution created a presumption of innocence and cautioning that “Boston can ill afford another Sacco and Vanzetti,”; and a second urging the public to reserve judgment about the propriety of “. . . Ms. Devlin defending Mr. Levy. Watch her closely,” the second editorial admonished, “and judge her by what she does.”

  “Seat taken?” Detective George Harriman asked.

  “Every Saturday still, Uncle George?”

  “The usual?” Paula, the morning waitress, asked Harriman. The grime of her breakfast shift greased her apron. The pocket where she hoarded her tips bulged with coins and bills. Her support hose billowed at the knees and buckled around the ankles; yet, on St. Patrick’s Day, she marched the entire route of the parade, then outlasted everyone line dancing. When Harriman nodded, she shouted to the cook, “Bucket of oats, stallion size.” Years of cigarette smoking had toasted her voice and she had the croak of an adolescent on the cusp of puberty.

  “It’s not the same without your da,” Harriman said to Maddie.

  Their friendship had been forged, Harriman’s and Brian Devlin’s, on Guadalcanal as they huddled in a foxhole behind slowly leaking sand bags along the Lunga perimeter. Behind them lay Henderson Field which they had been ordered to defend to the death by some general safely outside the line of fire. They had served together, two boys from Southie tossed by fate into the First Battalion, 7th Marines, both proud to be members of the First Team.

  Brian had turned twenty on Guadalcanal. The Marines had taken Henderson and the Japs were coming at them every which way to recapture it. Sea. Air. Ground. Thousands upon thousands for whom dying for emperor and empire was a point of honor. The rounds flying overhead, mortar shells exploding around them, incendiaries making barbecue pits out of foxholes and bunkers, shrapnel shredding flesh. War’s violence convinced Brian he would not survive to legal age. He saved his last pack of cigs for his birthday. Luckies. L. S/ M. F. T. Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. A wee bit of home. A wee bit of what he was fighting for. He tossed the pack over to the next foxhole and it went from foxhole to foxhole, everyone taking one until crumpled and crushed and empty, it came back to him. Sixty or so Marines died that afternoon, October 24, 1942. Twenty of them had smoked one of Brian’s Luckies, maybe more since Marines shared everything, in life and in death.

  The shooting had stopped. Spooked by the quiet of a lull in the combat, Harriman adjusted the chin strap of his helmet, checked his weapon, his supply of ammo. He hated the quiet. In combat, nothing good ever came of quiet. “Brian,” he whispered so as not to attract the attention of the Japanese machine gunners and mortar launchers, “I’m out of smokes.”

  Brian stared at the distant tree line. He squinted, raised his binoculars. “Something moving. At the tree line.” He handed them to Harriman.

  “Heat currents,” Harriman said, “fucking heat currents.”

  “Hear that?”

  “Mosquitoes.”

  Brian slapped at a mosquito on the back of his hand, smearing the blood it had just gorged on. The sun, hot and fiery, filled the sky and hovered above Guadalcanal as if it had moved several million miles closer to Earth. He could have boiled a cup of tea in his canteen if he had a teabag to dip in it. “Damn, I hate this fucking place.” Brian removed his helmet and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve, then rested his head against a sandbag. He had the troubled look of someone who needed absolution to die a good death.

  A second time, Harriman cleaned his weapon, checked his ammo supply, adjusted the chin strap of his helmet, preparing for the next barrage of artillery and mortars, the next wave of soldiers.

  They both survived, returning home to Southie, not the same men but in many ways no different than before they had shipped out.

  Now, almost forty years after Guadalcanal, these memories saddened Harriman as he sat across from Brian Devlin’s daughter in a back booth of Behan’s on another morning heat-soaked by a raging sun.

  “Beg off this case, Maddie. It’s so airtight Ugolino halted the investigation.”

  “He what? Suppose he’s innocent? What-if the real Dracula’s still out there?”

  “I know your track record, Maddie. If the police made a chain-of-custody mistake, if Charlie corrupted the crime scene, if the crime lab misread the prints, if the M E miscalculated the time of death, you’ll sling more shit than all the sheep in Ireland.”

  “Ugolino wants a change of venue. He wants to make the defense do what he should be doing. Why else his leak to the press? That means he has doubts about Levy’s guilt. If he does, why not me? Or you? Or the jury?”

  “Stupidity. Ego. Vanity. All make as much sense.”

  Maddie spread her eggs on a piece of toast. “Ketchup, please.” When he didn’t pass it, she reached across the table. Slapping the bottom of the bottle, she deposited thick red lines on her eggs, parallel lines like the bars of a jail cell.

  Paula brought Harriman his bowl of oatmeal, side dishes of brown sugar and raisins, and a mug of black coffee. He spooned some brown sugar into the oatmeal, then paused before stirring it in. Paula lingered at the table, her teeth bared like a person who wanted to pick a fight. Looking Maddie in the eye, she crossed herself. “What you’re doing is blasphemous,” she said.

  God talk, Maddie thought. She hated God talk. She had had her fill of God talk when her ma died; God talk from the nurses at the hospital who said ma’s death was a blessing because it killed her pain; God talk fr
om Father Curry who said ma now walked with God; God talk from Cornelius Moynihan, the director of Moynihan’s funeral home, who said ma’s serene countenance was a sign she had entered heaven. Everyone talked God talk so they wouldn’t have to deal with the grief of a young girl, everyone except Uncle George, this same Uncle George who now God talked to her of abandoning Avram Levy. If God didn’t want her to defend Levy, He would strike her dead was her attitude.

  Maddie wiped ketchup from her lips. At her ma’s wake, this Uncle George had sat with her in a small chapel in the back of Moynihan’s, a refuge from the thrum and thrush of conversation, the sobs of close friends, the sounds of mourning. The smell of flowers, too strong for the ventilation system, had infiltrated the chapel and roiled her stomach.

  Each year after her da and Harriman returned from Guadalcanal, they celebrated St. Patrick’s Day together, marching in the parade with the veterans from World War I, World War II, and, as the years passed, Korea and Vietnam, waving at the children who lined the street, children who in years to come would fight and die in other wars in other places. After the parade, they went to O’Driscoll’s where they sang and drank draught after draught of strong, black Guinness, first to the memory of their comrades in arms killed by the Japanese, then to Parnell, Robert Emmet, that Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone and Fitzgerald, Connolly and Pearse, MacDonagh and MacBride until they had lost count of the rounds, after which they recited Yeats’s fated benediction:

  All changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.

  At her ma’s wake, Maddie had turned to this Uncle George for the consolation her Da seemed unable to provide.