The Bomb Maker's Son

by Robert Rotstein

  “I don’t even know how Heim was able to . . .” She actually throws her hand to her lips as if to clamp her mouth shut.

  “How she was able to what, Mother?”

  “I can’t. It’s forbidden to discuss Assembly business with a nonbeliever.”

  “So you’ll just let them get away with trying to murder me, is that it, St. Quiana?”

  “Parker, please stop!” She covers her face with clawed fingers. She’s suddenly so overwrought I fear she’ll rake her eyes with her fingernails. Holzner rushes inside and puts an arm around her. She buries her head in his chest and begins to cry.

  “Let’s assume you’re right about this sainthood business,” he says to me. “That’s why the Catholic Church only confers sainthood on the dead. It’s too fucking hard for the living.” All the while, my mother’s shoulders are heaving, her face still glued to him. For the first time in years, I’m in the presence of the mother who raised me, vulnerable and sad.

  Lovely comes inside, and my mother immediately straightens her spine and places her hands in her lap like a royal at a state function, an act all the more ludicrous because her cheeks are shiny with tears.

  “Here’s how I see it,” Lovely announces. “Parker, you really don’t know what you saw. Maybe you saw Heim, maybe you didn’t. The car was a hundred yards away, speeding from the scene, and your gut was ripped with fear and your brain muddled with adrenaline shock. That’s certainly how I was feeling. Not to mention the sight of Belinda Hayes with her brains lying on the driveway and you had to pry her keys out of her hand. No way you could get a positive ID on the driver. And like the cops say, we were sitting ducks long before Hayes arrived.” She turns to Harriet and points a finger at her. “You got Parker into this, you got me into this, and now you won’t help us get to the bottom of it. The Assembly’s celestial attributes—fortitude, rectitude, beatitude, right? You’re not showing any of those. How come?”

  “You’re impertinent,” Harriet says, but her haughtiness is belied by the slight catch in her throat.

  Lovely places her left hand on a hip and bends her opposite leg like an impatient mother.

  Harriet glances at me and then folds in on herself. “I can’t do it.”

  “Can’t do what?” Lovely says.

  “I can’t control Heim. She became a devotee and somehow rose with the speed of a comet. I don’t know how she managed it in what, three or four years? Except for the fact she’s ruthless.” She looks at me sadly. “I’m not the woman I used to be, Parker. The Assembly values youth—Brad and I wanted it that way, because we were young, truly believed that if you drank of the Celestial Waters you’d never age. Bradley died, so he never aged. But me . . .” She places her hand on Ian’s shoulder. “Ian returned to my life, reminded me of youth, but it’s all just a memory. Parker, you’re forty years old. How can I have a child who’s forty years old?”

  Parents always seem old to a child, so their aging process is meaningless until the child himself begins truly to age. That’s happening to me, which is why I can finally recognize how time has taken its toll on Harriet Stern.

  “How did he find you?” I ask. “You’re not the easiest person to locate.”

  “Not that difficult if you know where to look.” This isn’t an explanation, it’s a rebuke. I start to follow up, but she crosses her arms tightly, like a complicated high-security lock tumbling closed. Pursuing this question will get nowhere. But I wonder—did they somehow keep in touch over so many years despite the risks to both of them?

  “Heim is out to get you, Mother,” I say. “You know that, don’t you?”

  Her hands are still in her lap, no longer folded but knotted tightly. “I’ve known that for some time. I have no idea whom to trust anymore. What is she after? My position?”

  “She came to The Barrista and asked me about Ascending Sodality.”

  She gasps and covers her mouth with her hand. “How would she know about that?”

  “There are a lot of children of the original founders who are now adults,” I say. “Someone was bound to talk. You either repress sexual abuse or you think about it every day of your life. I’m surprised no one has gone to the cops. Maybe she wants to use it to expose you, or maybe she’s after me because she thinks I’m finally going to tell what I know.”

  “Do you even know what we’re talking about?” Lovely asks Holzner.

  “I don’t pry into others’ secrets,” he says. “I’m a lot of things, but I’m not a hypocrite.”

  “Were you part of that?” Lovely asks my mother.

  “Never! I was the one who stopped it.”

  When Lovely looks at me for confirmation, I nod, because it’s literally true. Not that my mother stands on high moral ground. She claims she didn’t know, but I don’t think that’s possible.

  “I have to tell you this, Parker,” my mother says. “I don’t know if Mariko Heim was one of the people shooting at you. But she’s quite capable of it. A big reason she’s risen in the hierarchy is that she’s promised to rid the Assembly of its enemies. You, my son, remain high on that list.”

  There’s a knock at the door. When Lovely answers it, Emily walks inside and whines, “Aren’t you guys done yet? It’s freezing out there, and that marshal guy won’t even tell me who he thinks tried to kill Parker and Lovely.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It’s less than two weeks before trial, and the government has added a new witness to its list, a man named Ilan Goldsmith. They identify him as an FBI informant with knowledge of Ian Holzner’s role in the bombing of the Playa Delta VA. Holzner doesn’t recognize the name and neither does Moses Dworsky. After a day of digging, Dworsky comes up with the pseudonym Goldsmith used in the 1960s and ’70s—Secretary Cracknamara.

  “Cracknamara was a knockoff of the more famous General Hersheybar, who was himself a parody of General Hershey, at the time the odious head of the Selective Service, sending innocents to fight in a useless war,” Dworsky says. “Cracknamara would dress up like former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and engage in performance art at antiwar rallies. He was amusing, I will concede, but he also appeared to be emotionally disturbed, though harmless enough. I thought he was schizophrenic, to be quite candid. And all this time he was an FBI informant. A rat, in the vernacular. Quite brilliant, really. I am sure no one suspected. Evidently our client was snookered.”

  Unfortunately, Dworsky hasn’t been able to find Goldsmith, and we can’t determine what Goldsmith will actually say at trial because the US Attorney has been vague. I’d complain to Judge Gibson about Marilee Reddick’s ambush tactics, but he hasn’t been favorably disposed to our side since the day Dworsky scratched his nose in court.

  Emily’s presence in my home makes it hard to talk to my client. She doesn’t go to school—Holzner is indeed studying with her during the day. But she sometimes goes out at night, where, she won’t say. I know nothing about parenting, but if she were my daughter, I’d want to know where she’s going, almost eighteen or not. Tonight, though, her absence is convenient, because I can ask Holzner about Ilan Goldsmith. When I tell him that Secretary Cracknamara is on the government’s witness list, he turns ashen.

  “Jesus,” I say. “What?”

  After several false starts, he says, “It was three, four months before the Playa Delta bombing. We were deep underground by then. Belinda Hayes showed up at our apartment one night with the secretary in tow. Cracknamara was no fool, he only played one. He was resourceful, dedicated to the cause, or so I thought. And he was a source of two things we needed—dynamite and drugs.”

  “An FBI informant provided you with explosives?”

  “Evidently.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “See, that’s the problem. This time, he was supplying us with drugs. We all took LSD. Me, Belinda, Rachel, Cracknamara—everyone except Charlie Sedgwick, who was afraid. I’d had so many beautiful trips, but this one was ugly. I remember dropping the acid, and as soon as I
came on to the drug, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. My face, my entire body resembled a Jackson Pollock painting, all spattered with dots and dribs and streaks. It was beautiful, until the streaks began to wriggle and slither and became maggots that were eating my flesh, consuming my eyes, crawling up my nose, devouring my lips.” He closes his eyes and shudders. “Even all these years later my stomach churns when I think about it. Whenever I dropped acid, I’d write myself a note beforehand just in case, reminding myself that it wasn’t real, that it would end soon enough. This was the first time I resorted to the note. But when I read it, the letters were poisonous snakes and scorpions that tried to bite my face. Everything went a fiery red, and I thought I was blind, thought I’d gone insane—I was insane. Charlie got me through it, believe it or not, by starting one of his discussions on political theory. But during it . . . well, I might’ve said that the Weathermen had copped out when they stopped targeting human beings after the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. It was all talk, a way to fight off the disgusting insects that were gnawing at my flesh, to silence the hideous guitar-amp feedback squealing through my brain. If Charlie hadn’t started talking politics, I would’ve jumped out the window. Debating Marx and Mao and Marcuse was normal for us. He was trying to give me normal.”

  “What did the others say?”

  “Who knows? It’s been forty years.”

  “But you remember the incident.”

  “The bad trip. The debates were always the same. Charlie would’ve said it was wrong to harm civilians, though cops and military personnel were fair game. I might have said something about a VA being an appropriate target. Belinda would’ve agreed with me because she got off on the thought of violence. Ironic that all these years later, she died violently.”

  “Was O’Brien there?”

  “Rachel wouldn’t have said anything. She was cautious around people who weren’t in the collective, like I should’ve been. Cracknamara might’ve been a fellow traveler, but he was an outsider. We talked through the night and into the morning and then stopped, and I remember my head resting in Charlie’s lap when finally I came down. So I don’t really know exactly what I said.”

  “You’ve consistently maintained you didn’t have anything to do with Playa Delta. If that’s true, how is it possible that he’s going to implicate you in the attack? Is he going to lie, like you said Hayes and O’Brien did? It’s hard to believe that they’re all liars.”

  He gapes at me, and now I’m the one who feels that insects are probing at my flesh, because I finally understand. “You might have mentioned targeting a Veterans Administration building because that’s what you were planning to do,” I say. “You were planning it.”

  He exhales audibly and rubs his eyes with his thumbs, almost gouging them. His hands flop hard into his lap. “I called it off, Parker. We all agreed.”

  “You’ve been lying to me all this time.”

  “Not about the important part. I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know how it happened.”

  “Why did you call it off?”

  “Because I realized it was murder, not revolution.”

  “That’s not what you’d believed for years. What changed your mind so abruptly?”

  “Maybe your birth had something to do with it.”

  “Why don’t I buy that?”

  He shrugs, then stands up and stretches his arms toward the ceiling. “Wish I had a cigarette.”

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “I don’t. Not in forty years.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before so we could’ve prepared for it?”

  “I never suspected Cracknamara was FBI, and I certainly never thought that he’d come forward and implicate himself.”

  “I’m your lawyer. I need to know all the facts.”

  “No matter what you think of me, you’re my son. You’ve been in my mind for all these years. A father doesn’t want to disappoint his son.”

  “Who the hell cares what was in your mind? Your imagination had nothing to do with my reality. What’s real is you were doing these awful, violent things until I was, what, a year, a year-and-a-half old? While I was learning to walk and talk, you were playing guerrilla soldier.”

  Despite my harsh words, I know he cared about me. There’s the photo taken in the forest when I fell and scraped my knee. At least at that moment, he was my father. More than that, when the photo was taken, he would’ve been on the lam for six months. Long gone, one would think. Yet he apparently risked his freedom to see my mother and me. Harriet took a huge chance, too. She was harboring a fugitive and could’ve been charged as an accessory to murder.

  Who shot that photo? I haven’t bothered to ask my parents. I’m sure they won’t tell me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Wednesday, December 17, 2014: to the day the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Playa Delta bombing, and the first day of trial in United States v. Holzner. Judge Gibson’s morbid scheduling joke. As a defense lawyer, I would ordinarily welcome a trial at Christmas time, because jurisprudential folklore has it that jurors are more likely to show mercy during the holiday season. Not in this case. Their tendency will be to give a gift to the bereft families of the Playa Delta dead.

  Ian Holzner insists on wearing prison garb and shackles again, and this time Marilee Reddick doesn’t object. Why would she? JB’s courthouse bombing and the murder of Belinda Hayes have changed everything. The media has speculated that Holzner is an unreconstructed terrorist who orchestrated the acts of violence while under house arrest. It’s just fine with Reddick if Holzner looks like a jailbird and a mass murderer. And that’s just what he looks like, dressed in those clothes. Never mind that earlier this year he became eligible for Medicare.

  What I do know is that despite his bravado, Holzner is frightened. When the marshals arrived at my condo unit this morning to transport him to the courthouse, he was trembling. He calmed down only when Emily came into the room. It’s not that surprising, really. He spent a lifetime running from this day. Is that why he insists on coming to court in shackles and jail garb? Not to make some political statement, but to fend off the fear? I’d find something ignoble in his attempt to play detached warrior except for one thing: I, too, am a man who’s scared and trying not to show it.

  Reddick and I stand before Judge Carlton Gibson, who’s just called our case. Before we attorneys can state our appearances, the judge begins admonishing Holzner, who once again refused to rise when Gibson entered the room.

  “That’s your freebie, Mr. Holzner,” the judge says. “You will stand when the prospective jurors are brought to the courtroom. Once we impanel a jury, you will stand when they enter and leave the courtroom. If you don’t, you’ll be ejected, and you’ll observe the proceedings in a tiny room we have for recalcitrant witnesses. I call it the poco room. Some describe it as a cell. I hope you’re not claustrophobic. Comprendes?” Without waiting for a response, he gestures toward the marshal. “Bring them in, ándale!”

  It takes twenty-five minutes before the marshal comes back with the jury pool. The prospective jurors file in, seated both in the jury box and in the first three rows of the gallery, which have been kept empty for them. There are about fifty people in the pool, some with their eyes on Holzner, but just as many staring at me, as if I’m the one who’s on trial. Maybe that’s a good thing—I’ve got a better chance of winning the jury’s sympathy than he does.

  “This is a murder case,” Judge Gibson says to the jury. “It’ll last some weeks, into January, so kiss your Christmas good-bye. Don’t give me any phony excuses. You have a civic duty as American citizens to serve, and you’ll do so unless I say so.” His voice crackles with irascibility. The vast majority of judges treat prospective jurors with patience and compassion. The court process is unfamiliar and intimidating, exponentially more so when the trial involves a notorious defendant charged with murder. Gibson is the only judge I’ve ever seen who’s shown hostility to
prospective jurors.

  “Whoever believes he or she can’t serve on the jury, raise a hand,” he says.

  No response at first, but then a few hands timidly go up. The judge twists his mouth in disdain and calls on each. A young woman owns a flower shop and almost tearfully says her business will suffer if she’s absent for more than a week; a well-dressed blond says she’s a working actress and has an audition at Paramount next week; an elderly woman says she’s hearing impaired and can’t serve effectively; an even older man says he’s caring for his wife, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.

  The only person Gibson excuses from jury duty is the actress.

  “I’m going to ask each of you some questions, and you better answer truthfully,” he says. “It’s your obligation.” If we were in state court, the lawyers would get a chance to ask the questions—voir dire, it’s called—but here in federal court it’s the judge’s show. Both sides have suggested questions in writing, but the judge is free to ignore them.

  The clerk calls fifteen names. Those who were chosen take seats up front. After asking some basic background questions—age, marital status, occupation, level of education, relationship to the parties or lawyers—the judge says, “Those of you who’ve heard about this case, or what’s called the Playa Delta bombing, raise your hands.”

  The only one who doesn’t raise his hand is a young man with long, oily brown hair, an acne-scored complexion, and an indelible smirk. He says his name is Joey. He’s twenty-eight years old, an animator for an Internet company that creates online commercials.

  “How could you possibly not know about this case, sir?” the judge snarls. “It’s all over the news.” It occurs to me that Judge Gibson hasn’t peppered his language with Spanish words in the presence of the jury pool. I suspect half the man’s eccentricities are contrived. I worry about the other half, however. I also worry that those people who are ultimately selected as jurors will so despise Carlton Gibson that they’ll take their wrath out on Ian Holzner.