The Bomb Maker's Son

by Robert Rotstein

  Harriet walks back over to us. “The government still uses illegal tactics to spy on law-abiding citizens, to trample on constitutional rights.”

  “So say the Sanctified Assembly propagandists,” I reply.

  Ordinarily, she’d snap back, but now she crosses her arms and looks to Holzner almost deferentially.

  “COINTELPRO’s investigation of the Weather Underground was so dirty that no one went to jail,” Holzner says. “You could use the same defense.”

  “There’s a difference,” I say. “If I’m not mistaken, their bombs never killed or injured anyone. You’re charged with multiple murders, and we live in a post-9/11 world.”

  “I didn’t harm anyone, either. The cops set me up, illegally seized evidence. Fabricated it.”

  “I need specifics.”

  “Three COINTELPRO agents picked up my brother, Jerry, by the ankles, dangled him off a third-floor landing, and threatened to drop him headfirst if he didn’t tell them my whereabouts. They repeatedly broke into my parents’ home and conducted illegal searches, trying to make it look like burglary. I believe they illegally taped conversations of people I knew.”

  There’s a sharp rapping from the faux-brass door knocker, followed immediately by four knocks with pounding fists. Another breach of building security. Holzner and my mother glance at each other, two people who share a secret and a plan. More pounding, so hard that I fear the wood will splinter. Holzner dashes toward the glass door that leads to my balcony, slides it open, and, like some 1960s-movie cat burglar, vaults over the concrete wall—a remarkable feat for anyone, and especially a man his age. I hurry after him and look down, expecting to see him lying injured after a drop from the second floor. He’s gone.

  Before I can stop her, my mother goes over and opens the door to two men dressed in black suits and red ties, the uniform worn by enforcers for the Church of the Sanctified Assembly. With them is a tall, angular woman with Eurasian features. She’s dressed in a black pantsuit and red business blouse. She wears no makeup, and yet her round face, wide eyes, and tapered nose make her beautiful, if any human who shows no emotion can truly be beautiful.

  Maybe it’s my mother’s straighter posture or her harsh gaze, but she’s Quiana again, and only now do I truly notice that she hasn’t been Quiana since she showed up at my condo.

  “What are you doing here, Heim?” my mother says in a condescending tone.

  “We were concerned about you, ma’am,” the woman says unctuously. “And we obviously had reason to be.” She deigns to let her icy brown eyes drift over to me. “We didn’t expect to find you in the presence of this apostate.” Her tone has changed to mildly disdainful, unheard of for an Assembly functionary. Harriet starts to speak but doesn’t say a word. This Heim is either risking harsh punishment or isn’t the low-level functionary I took her to be.

  “And I didn’t expect the Sanctified Assembly gestapo to trespass on my property,” I say. “Get out.” I walk over and interpose myself between the trio and my mother. The two thugs close ranks and come forward.

  “You’re impertinent,” my mother says to me. “Just remember what I’ve told you and heed my words. You’re to back off, Parker.” She turns to the Assembly devotees. “I have no obligation to explain myself to you, Mariko. But if you had a brain in your head, you’d realize that this person was once related to me and that he spends his life blaspheming. I can get him to stop.” She motions with her fingers and walks out the door. The two men follow immediately, but the woman lingers, regarding me with scorn, until she, too, walks out the door.

  Only then do I consciously understand what just happened. I tried to protect my mother. I haven’t done that since I was eleven years old. These people are supposed to obey her every command. What is it about Ian Holzner that would make Harriet risk her exalted position? It can’t just be that forty years ago, he saddled her with me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  One of the selling points of my condo unit is the ability to stand outside on the balcony and watch the sailboats, tour crafts, and speedboats maneuver through the Marina Del Rey jetty and out into the Pacific’s vastness. The sun-dappled surface, the sharp horizon, the wispy cirrus clouds leave the false impression that the sea has discernible boundaries. Only at night, facing the dense black, can one conjure the true ocean and begin to understand that its apparent contours, like the apparent contours of life, are products of deficient imagination.

  I look out into the void and try to process what just happened. My mother is apparently jeopardizing her position in the Assembly to help a man who’s an alleged murderer. For all I know, Ian Holzner is some Sanctified Assembly elder involved in a byzantine scheme that only he and Harriet understand. Harriet claims he isn’t. But she’s lied to manipulate others for at least as long as I’ve had memory.

  Still, I’m curious, both as a lawyer presented with a singular case and as a son who’s discovered his long-lost father. I power up my computer and search the name Ian Holzner. The Wikipedia article shows a black-and-white news photograph of him taken during a protest over the 1970 National Guard killing of four students at Kent State University. Despite his Fu Manchu moustache and shoulder-length dark hair, he bears a striking resemblance to how I looked when I was that age. I find myself irrationally staring at the photo to confirm that that young man is not me, mystically transported back in time. He’s wearing a military camouflage jacket and work shirt, like you see in movies and TV shows about that era. A cliché. He’s holding a megaphone, his lips parted midspeech. His right arm is raised in the air, fist clenched. Another cliché. But clichés begin as powerful symbols, and these particular symbols started with guys like Holzner.

  I scroll down to the “Early Life” section. He was born on January 22, 1949, in Playa Delta, California, the adopted son of former vaudevillians. His father, a tightrope walker and juggler, was of Irish descent. His mother, who was Jewish, was one of the record-breaking acrobats depicted in a famous picture on the top of San Francisco’s Coit Tower in 1946.

  The article contains a link to a YouTube video of the stunt. The men are shirtless, and the woman is dressed in a gymnast’s leotard and a tutu. One of the men is stretched out in a backbend on the building’s ledge. A second man is doing a handstand on the prone man’s chest. Holzner’s mother is doing a handstand by holding onto the second man’s feet. Only the acrobats’ collective ability to maintain their balance keeps her from tumbling off the building to certain death. My insides flutter and dip not only because I don’t like heights but also because I realize the woman in this video is my grandmother.

  I return to the Wikipedia entry. Holzner’s parents encouraged him to take up gymnastics. In 1967, UC Berkeley awarded him a full athletic scholarship. Upon enrolling, he majored in engineering but later switched to philosophy. As a freshman member of the gymnastics team, he was named an All American for the floor exercise. He narrowly missed qualifying for the 1968 US Olympic team. So that’s how a sixty-five-year-old man was able to vault over my second-story balcony and disappear into the night. The man is a stranger, and yet I feel irrational pride in his early accomplishments.

  The article goes on to describe how Holzner, deeply affected by the police beatings of protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, gave up gymnastics for anti–Vietnam War, and later, antigovernment, politics. He dropped out of college midway through his sophomore year. Over time, he became involved in increasingly violent confrontations with the police. He was arrested and jailed for disturbing the peace, trespassing, destruction of property, and criminal conspiracy.

  The end of the Vietnam War in 1973 didn’t diminish his radicalism. That same year, he and a woman named Rachel O’Brien formed a collective that law enforcement dubbed the Holzner-O’Brien Gang, which claimed responsibility for bombing several federal facilities and businesses throughout the western United States, causing only property damage but no bodily injury. The reasons for the continued violence were unfocused: a corp
oration’s support of South African apartheid; another’s support of a coup in Chile; the Oregon Health Department’s alleged sterilization of poor women; the Los Angeles Police Department’s involvement in the deaths of six members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. It seems that, once the Vietnam War was over, Holzner and his ilk were aspiring revolutionaries in search of a cause. Or maybe he just enjoyed making bombs and setting them off.

  As Holzner told me, the 1975 bombing of the Playa Delta Veterans Administration killed four and injured nineteen. Although no one took credit for the act of terror, forensic analysis identified Holzner as the bomb maker. After a manhunt that lasted days, and in which he was supposedly holed up in a house in the South Central ghetto, he somehow evaded capture, spending years on the FBI’s most-wanted list until more contemporary criminals and terrorists supplanted him. His partner, Rachel O’Brien, was arrested in 1976 during a raid on an Oregon commune. She was tried for murder but avoided the rap by implicating Holzner in the bombing. The jury did convict her on the lesser charge of conspiracy. She served seven years in prison before winning parole in 1983.

  At the end of the article is a collection of quotations attributed to Holzner. I only have to read one to know how misguided my father was: It’s time for privileged white kids to join our black brothers and sisters and take up arms against the racist American war machine; it’s time for us to build the bombs that will reduce our hometowns and the bourgeois values they represent to rubble. Long live revolution!

  I close the article, clicking the mouse aggressively, surprised at my level of agitation—or is it disgust? My mother is a domineering, abusive stage mother turned religious charlatan who preys on the vulnerability of others for profit and self-aggrandizement. My father was an immature, privileged kid who was playing war and might have murdered innocent people. I’ve spent my professional life trying to see that justice is done, and when that’s impossible, to represent my clients zealously. As for my private life, I’ve tried to lay low and not hurt the people around me. Reading about Holzner, I feel that I’m not the person I thought I was, that somehow I’m complicit in his crimes. Once revealed, long-suppressed truth can be so disappointing.

  If the Law Offices of Parker Stern exist, they’re located at my back table in The Barrista Coffee House in West Hollywood. The staff and I jointly own the place. Now, it’s the day following the visit from my “parents,” and the last of the late-afternoon caffeine freaks have just left the shop. I’m reading a memoir by Bill Ayers, one of the founders of the Weather Underground. The book is self-indulgent and defensive, but what I care about is that Ayers seems to ignore the Holzner-O’Brien Gang entirely. At least I’m getting a sense of these 1970s radicals, seen through the prism of old-age rationalization. They were educated, well-off, good-looking, popular kids who formed their own deadly fraternity and played at guerilla warfare. They were so condescending and narcissistic that they actually believed they could lead the oppressed masses in armed rebellion against the United States government, when all the masses wanted was their share of the American dream. The Weather Underground, the SLA, the Holzner O’Brien Gang—they didn’t have any idea which way the winds were blowing.

  Someone approaches my table and hovers over me. I look up to see my mother, dressed in a black peacoat, white blouse, black beret tilted on her head at a forty-five-degree angle, Jackie-O sunglasses, and a fuchsia silk scarf. If she thinks she’s incognito, she’s wrong. Her outlandish outfit is only drawing attention. Once again, she’s alone.

  She sits across from me, removes the sunglasses, and like a Vegas blackjack dealer satisfying a hit, slides a manila folder toward me. She turns around and motions toward Romulo, The Barista’s manager, who’s doing double duty busing tables.

  “Fetch me a black coffee in a paper cup,” Harriet says to him. It’s a command, not a request.

  “I thought caffeine is off limits for Assembly devotees,” I say.

  “Just this once.” She flutters a hand toward Romulo. “I’m with your boss. He says it’s on the house.”

  “Romulo is my partner and The Barrista’s manager,” I say. “The real boss. And he doesn’t give out freebies.”

  “It cuts into the profits,” Romulo says with a straight face, though he’s a man who laughs easily.

  Harriet blinks once but shows no embarrassment. “You mean I have to pay for my drink?”

  “It’s Romulo’s call.”

  He makes a mock show of contemplation. “Okay, on the house this one time.”

  Harriet turns away, frowning as if she were the one who’d been put upon. She and I stare at each other in silence. Thirty seconds later, Romulo returns with the coffee. She doesn’t even thank him.

  “What can I do for you, Mother?”

  She slaps her hand on the table hard, rattling my coffee cup. “Open the envelope.”

  Inside, I find a black-and-white photograph of a young Ian Holzner holding a toddler in his arms. The boy has a Band-Aid on his left knee and streaks of blood on his shin. He’s grasping the man’s neck with both arms. Holzner looks like he did in the Wikipedia photo, though he’s shaved off the Fu Manchu mustache. He’s grinning slightly, but the expression might only be an involuntary contraction of the risorius muscle, because there’s no joy in his face. Standing to his right is a petite woman in a dark tank top and bell-bottom jeans—Harriet Stern. She’s wearing aviator sunglasses, and she’s barefoot. Her straight, dark hair flows down to her waist. She, too, is smiling, but there’s something downcast in her expression. She’s holding a cigarette between the index and middle fingers of her right hand. I started acting in commercials at age three, so I’ve seen photos of myself as a toddler, but no pictures like this. I can’t remember seeing any photos of my mother and me together taken before I turned seven years old. By that time, I was already an established actor. I stare at the photo for a long time. We were in the woods somewhere.

  “I don’t remember this,” I say. But I’ve always had a blurry memory of scraping my knee in the forest and of a nice man holding me. It’s my only recollection of a father, a fragment of memory that I’ve clung to all my life while fearing that I imagined it. The pain from learning that it’s real is excruciating. I toss the photo back to my mother.

  “What’s the point of all this, Harriet? It’s too late, too sordid.”

  “If you represent him, I’ll answer your questions. After the case is over.”

  “What questions?”

  “The ones you’ve been asking ever since you were a child. About your history.”

  “As if I’d believe what you’d tell me.”

  We stare at each other for a long time.

  “Why would you want to hire me?” I say. “Why not get a lawyer who’s objective? A lawyer who’s more qualified? I’m not even a criminal lawyer.”

  “We want you because you’re his son. No one else will believe in his innocence.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll believe in his innocence.”

  “But you’ll want to. Besides, you’re good. And I know you. You want the information I’m offering.” Everything has always been a commodity for my mother—patience, compassion, her own child. Especially her own child.

  “Even if I wanted to take the case—”

  “Of course you want to, Parky.”

  “Even if I wanted to take the case, I couldn’t. If Holzner turns himself in, the feds are going to seek the death penalty, and I don’t qualify as competent counsel.”

  “You’ve tried a death-penalty case before.”

  So she’s been following my career for a long time, because I was involved in that capital homicide case after only five years on the job. I don’t know whether I’m pleased or annoyed that she observed my life like a lurker on an Internet bulletin board.

  “I handled one capital case when I was an associate,” I say. “I was third chair. It was pro bono, and I was working with two experienced death-penalty experts. Under the rules of court, to serve as lead couns
el in a capital case, you have to have practiced criminal law for ten years, including, I don’t know, two or three murder cases.”

  “You’ve handled other pro bono cases involving serious crimes. The woman who killed her husband because he beat her, that bank robbery.”

  “I’m mostly a civil lawyer, Harriet.”

  “There’s an alternative. You can do it if you consult with an experienced death-penalty lawyer. I already arranged it.”

  “What do you mean you arranged it?”

  “Louis Frantz can act as consulting attorney.” Lou Frantz is one of the top trial lawyers in the country, a person who inspires awe in even the smug TV legal commentators and the litigation wonks. Frantz and I have been adversaries in two brutal lawsuits and don’t like each other.

  “That’s absurd.”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “Why don’t you just hire Frantz to represent Holzner? He’ll definitely take Assembly money.”

  “Because Ian and I want you.”

  “Frantz would never agree to help me even if I were willing.”

  “He’s already agreed.”

  Of course. The Church of the Sanctified Assembly is one of Lou Frantz’s biggest clients.

  “Your girlfriend will assist you in the trial, if that makes a difference,” she says.

  “By my girlfriend, you’re talking about Lovely Diamond?”

  “Yes. I can’t get over that silly name.”

  Lovely Diamond is a lawyer who works for Lou Frantz. She’s also my former law student, a budding superstar trial lawyer, and the woman I can’t have but can’t live without. At age nineteen, she spent a year or two performing in hardcore pornographic videos, a fact that many in the media won’t let her forget. About a year ago, she regained custody of the son that she’d given up at birth, and soon after she broke off our relationship because I wasn’t father material. She also thought that I courted danger. Since then, I’ve tried to win her back, but it’s mostly been a war of attrition.