Chosen People

by Robert Whitlow

  “I want to do it,” Hana said.

  “I’ve seen that in your eyes the whole time you’ve been sitting here,” Mr. Lowenstein said. “And when I see that determination in a lawyer’s eyes, it gets my attention. Let’s take the next step, which is an investigation. Brodsky and the client will fund that part of the litigation. Except for your time, the risk to the firm is low.”

  “Do the partners have to agree?”

  “I’ll send around a memo, but I think it will be fine. Go ahead and sign a cocounsel agreement.”

  “Thank you,” Hana said.

  Mr. Lowenstein ran his fingers through his gray hair. “I hope you can say that to me a year from now.”

  Hana returned to the conference room and delivered the good news. Ben didn’t seem surprised, but Jakob was clearly shocked.

  “What did you say to convince him?” he blurted out.

  “He’s a grandfather with granddaughters. I think that was as important as anything. If you’re ready, I’ll modify the cocounsel agreement and bring it in for your signatures.”

  Jakob and Ben looked at each other and nodded. Hana turned toward the door.

  “I want to go with you,” Sadie said. “You can show me where you work.”

  “It’s up to you,” Ben said to Hana with a wave of his hand.

  Hana squeezed Sadie’s hand as they walked down the hallway. The child seemed completely at peace. They reached Janet’s desk.

  “Janet, this is Sadie Neumann,” Hana said.

  “Hi, Sadie,” Janet replied, laying her dictation earbuds on the desk. “It looks like you’ve found a new friend.”

  Hana explained to Janet the changes needed in the cocounsel agreement.

  “I’m on it,” Janet replied.

  Hana took Sadie into her office. The little girl walked around the desk and climbed into the modern executive chair.

  “Does this chair go in circles?” Sadie asked.

  “Yes.” Hana spun her around a few times.

  “Faster, please,” Sadie said.

  Hana spun the chair slightly faster. Sadie put her head down and closed her eyes.

  “Okay, the ride is over,” Hana said as the chair slowed.

  Sadie looked around the room and spotted the picture of Khadijah on the corner of the desk. “Is that your little girl?” she asked.

  “No, my niece. Her name is Khadijah.”

  Sadie repeated the name. Hana added the Arabic for “She is my niece,” which Sadie mimicked perfectly.

  “Maybe you should add Arabic to Hebrew and Spanish,” Hana said.

  Janet brought in the cocounsel agreement. “It was a quick fix,” the assistant said and then turned to Sadie. “You’re a doll baby.”

  “No, I’m a girl,” Sadie replied.

  “That’s right,” Hana said to Janet. “A very smart girl.”

  Sadie sat in Hana’s lap while Hana checked the revisions in the document. They then retraced their steps to the small conference room.

  “Here you go,” Hana said, handing the agreement to Jakob.

  Sadie resumed her place on Hana’s lap. Hana turned the chair so that she and the child could look out the wall window again.

  “Do you see how small the people look on the sidewalk?” Hana asked.

  Sadie leaned forward and peered down. “Can they see us?” she asked.

  “No, there’s something on the outside of the window that lets us see out but makes it hard for them to see in during the daytime.”

  “But they can see us if it’s dark outside and the light is on in here?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the way it is at my house. I keep the blinds closed so that no bad people can see into my room. Daddy bought a box that calls the police if any bad people try to come inside our house.”

  “That’s because he cares about you.”

  “Do you have one of those boxes at your house?”

  “No,” Hana said. “I rent my house. Do you know what that means?”

  Sadie shook her head.

  “I don’t own the house. Someone else does, and I pay them money every month so I can stay there.”

  “You could stay at our house for free,” Sadie noted. “We have two bedrooms that no one sleeps in except when my nana or my grammy spends the night. My favorite room has light blue walls. Would you like to come over and see it?”

  “Sadie,” Ben cut in. “You need to let Ms. Abboud decide where she wants to live.”

  “Ms. Abboud?” Sadie asked. “I thought your name was Hana.”

  “It is for you.”

  “The agreement looks fine,” Jakob said.

  Hana swiveled around in the chair and faced Ben. “Any questions?”

  “No, I’ll leave the paperwork up to you lawyers. I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to explain to Sadie that she shouldn’t invite you to live with us without asking me first.”

  “Could you come to my birthday party?” Sadie asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Hana answered, looking toward Ben for help.

  “I’ll send you an invitation as soon as I finish coloring it,” Sadie continued. “Daddy, I have two left in the box you bought me.”

  After adding his signature to the document, Jakob slid the cocounsel agreement across the table to Hana. “Would you make a copy for me?”

  “Of course.” Hana gently lifted Sadie off her lap and quickly left the room as tears threatened her eyes. Through bleared vision she signed the agreement on a small worktable next to the copy machine nearest the conference room. No child, regardless of the reason or supposed justification, was a legitimate object of terror. Absent Gloria Neumann’s instinctive, sacrificial love, this could have been a double death case.

  As she slipped copies of the agreement into separate envelopes for Jakob and Ben, Hana thought about how Sadie represented the many other children maimed or killed or orphaned over the past seventy years since the founding of Israel. Jewish, Arab, Christian, Muslim, Druze—children in the wrong place at the wrong time when bullets were fired, rockets flew, or bombs dropped.

  Children who bore no guilt yet suffered great loss.

  Hana returned to the conference room. Sadie beamed when she appeared. Hana managed a slight smile but couldn’t escape how severely Sadie’s own smile dwindled when it reached the scar at the corner of her mouth. It was the smile of an overcomer who didn’t fully understand what she had to overcome.

  CHAPTER 9

  Before leaving Collins, Lowenstein, and Capella, Sadie insisted that her father take a photo of her with Hana on Jakob’s phone and then send it to the lawyer so Hana could “remember what I look like.”

  “I’ll be glad to give you and Sadie a ride wherever you need to go,” Jakob said when they were standing in front of the elevator. “I don’t need to go back to the office.”

  “Are you sure?” Ben asked. “We’ll be trapped in rush-hour traffic.”

  “That’s true in every direction.”

  “If you could drop us off at the mall near my in-laws’ house, that would be great,” Ben said. “Gloria’s father can pick us up there.”

  “You mean Poppy?” Sadie asked as the elevator doors opened.

  “Yes.”

  “I want to see him,” Sadie said. “And tell him about Hana.”

  “Ms. Abboud made quite an impression on Sadie,” Jakob said as they walked toward the parking garage.

  “Yes,” Ben agreed. “It’s happened before. Women meet Sadie and are instantly drawn to her. This time, the feeling was mutual.” Leaning over and speaking in a voice only Jakob could hear, he continued, “The birthday party thing really threw me for a loop. If Hana shows up, people will immediately assume we’re dating. Right or wrong, that would create a whole lot of other questions.”

  They reached Jakob’s car.

  “Where’s my booster seat?” Sadie asked her father.

  “In our car. You’ll still be buckled in and safe.”

  After exiting the par
king garage, Jakob eventually turned right into a stream of slow-moving traffic. The navigation app on his phone predicted a forty-five-minute drive to the rendezvous spot with Ben’s father-in-law.

  “How long will it take your father-in-law to drive to the mall?”

  “Five minutes.”

  “I could take you directly to his house.”

  “No, Sadie will enjoy grabbing a bite to eat with her poppy.”

  “I want fried chicken,” the little girl said.

  “She loves fried chicken,” Ben said to Jakob. “And not just the ordinary kind. She wants it spicy.”

  “I like spicy chicken, too,” Jakob said, glancing in the rearview mirror at Sadie.

  Sadie was staring out the window. “What is Hana doing now?” she asked.

  “She’s a lawyer like Mr. Jakob,” Ben said. “She’s probably talking to people she helps or writing letters to judges.”

  “Or entering her time for the day,” Jakob said to Ben. “Most lawyers at firms like that bill by the hour. It’s rare for them to work on a contingency case.”

  “Would you please call Hana for me?” Sadie asked her father. “I want to FaceTime.”

  “No, we need to let her work,” Ben said and then turned to Jakob. “She FaceTimes a lot with her poppy, nana, grammy, and grandad. If I’d let them, they’d buy her a phone and put it on their plan, but she’s only six.”

  “I’m almost seven,” Sadie responded. “Liza has a phone. She uses it to talk to her nana.”

  “While you’re at school?” Ben asked sharply.

  “Yes, it’s okay. The teacher doesn’t know about it.”

  Ben turned sideways in his seat so he could look directly into Sadie’s eyes. “I know what we’re going to talk about tonight when it’s bedtime.”

  Hana opened the photo of herself and Sadie. In the picture Hana was sitting in a conference room chair with the little girl standing beside her and resting her hand casually on Hana’s shoulder. Janet appeared in the doorway.

  “Was Mr. Neumann smitten with you as much as his daughter was?”

  Janet’s question raised an issue Hana hadn’t considered. She showed Janet the photo on her phone.

  “No, it was all about me and Sadie.”

  “It would be for me, too,” Janet admitted as she stared at the photo and touched her own face at the place where Sadie’s scar began and ran her finger to the corner of her mouth.

  “Yes,” Hana said, acknowledging Janet’s empathy. “And then there are the invisible scars on the inside that no one can see.”

  “Maybe you can be part of her healing.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Oh, how was your date last night?” Janet asked.

  Hana told her about her conversation with Bart Kendall. When she got to the end, the assistant gasped. “What? I would have slapped his face off!”

  “Maybe I’m making it sound worse than it was.”

  “No, it was worse than you’re telling,” Janet said. “I’m going to mark his name off the list.”

  “You have a list?”

  “Not yet, but if I do, his name won’t be on it.” Janet turned and left with a huff aimed at Bart.

  Hana’s phone buzzed. It was Mr. Lowenstein, who asked, “Any other surprises on the Neumann matter?”

  “No. Sadie is adorable, and I think Ben will be easy to work with. The cocounsel agreement is signed, and Jakob Brodsky is going to transfer the cost advance money tomorrow.”

  “I sent an email to the equity partners after you left my office, and a majority wrote back and gave approval to proceed. Hire a private investigator and book a flight to Israel to get things moving.”

  “Go to Israel now?”

  “I trust your eyes and your brain to give me reliable information. Also, begin developing your own relationship with the client independent of Jakob Brodsky. I’m not sold on his contribution to the claim, and I want you to be on solid footing with Ben Neumann if we need to cut ties with Brodsky later on.”

  Mr. Lowenstein’s mind was rapidly moving in unexpected directions. Hana wasn’t sure exactly how to react.

  “Sadie wants me to join them for ice cream as soon as possible and attend her birthday party.”

  “Excellent. You won her over quickly.”

  “It was mutual.”

  “Set up an ice cream date. Pay for it as a business expense.” Mr. Lowenstein paused. “Do you have any initial thoughts about an individual investigator or a firm to interview?”

  “No,” Hana said. “But I can begin with the contacts I made when I worked at the airport.”

  “Sounds good. Provide me with regular updates when there’s something worth passing along.”

  During the stop-and-go commute to the mall, Sadie fell asleep in the rear seat of the car.

  “What happens next in the case?” Ben asked.

  “There will be strategy meetings,” Jakob answered vaguely. “I have ideas for the investigative stage that I’ll pass along to Hana and Leon Lowenstein. We’ll divide the labor, but I’ll have more time to work on the case than they do. The fact that Hana speaks Arabic and Hebrew should be a plus.”

  “She’s passionate about helping.”

  “Yeah, and that’s good. I’d hoped we’d cover next steps in the case today, but this was a meet-and-greet session.”

  Ben turned in his seat and glanced at Sadie. “Especially for Sadie. She’s going to bug me about calling Hana. Once Sadie fixates on something, I think she’s tougher to distract than a typical six-year-old.”

  “Or almost seven as she puts it,” Jakob said.

  “Over there is fine,” Ben said as he pointed to the south side of the mall. “That’s close to the place where Sadie and her grandfather like to eat.”

  Jakob waited for a pickup truck to get out of the way so he could move forward.

  Ben leaned over the seat and patted Sadie on the knee. “Ready to see Poppy?” he asked.

  Sadie opened her eyes and stretched her arms. “Yes.”

  Jakob handed Ben the envelope containing an extra copy of the cocounsel agreement.

  “Thanks for going out of your way to give us a ride,” Ben said.

  Jakob watched father and daughter walk hand in hand toward the mall. Hearing Hana’s words and watching her reaction to Sadie had reinforced something Jakob already knew—there was something unique about the Neumann case.

  Hana arrived home and set a pot of homemade soup she’d made a few days earlier on the stove to warm. While she waited, she went outside to refill a finch feeder she’d recently hung from a tree limb. She’d been able to attract a steady stream of bright yellow finches with an occasional purple one thrown in.

  The sun dipped below the tree line and cast long shadows across the small yard in front of her house. While she was pouring tiny black seeds into the plastic tube, she heard a rustle in the heavily wooded area at the edge of the property. She peered in the direction of the sound, expecting a squirrel to emerge and scamper up a nearby tree with a nut in its mouth. The sound grew louder, followed by a long, low moan that made the hair on the back of Hana’s neck stand up.

  One of her neighbors had recently posted signs on several nearby telephone poles warning of a rabid fox and giving the phone number for the city animal control unit. Hana glanced over her shoulder toward the door of the house and prepared to run if a crazed fox dashed out into the open. With a louder crash and scuffle, a furry animal rolled out of the woods into the fading sunlight. It wasn’t a fox; it was a black-and-white puppy.

  The dog shook some dead leaves and twigs from its fur and walked over to Hana. It was a male, with a thick coat and oversize feet that promised an impending growth spurt. Hana rubbed the dog’s neck. There was no collar. It had either wandered away from home or been abandoned.

  Individual pet ownership was less common in Israel than in the US, and there were no domestic animals in the large house in Reineh where Hana grew up. Most of the dogs she saw as a child were half-wi
ld animals that foraged on household garbage. The puppy began to furiously lick Hana’s fingers with his thick pink tongue.

  “Okay, okay,” Hana said in English. “It is nice to meet you, too.”

  Thoughts of the rabid fox on the loose in the neighborhood made Hana feel protective. She carried the puppy into the house. Taking a bowl from the cupboard, she filled it with water and placed it on the kitchen floor. The dog buried its nose in the bowl and rapidly lapped up the water.

  “You’re thirsty,” Hana said.

  There was a drainage ditch at the rear of the neighborhood, but it filled with water only during rainstorms. If she turned him loose, Hana wasn’t sure where the lost animal would find his next drink of water, much less something to eat. The puppy lifted a paw and placed it in the middle of the remaining water in the bowl. The water turned slightly brown.

  Hana carried the puppy into the bathroom and placed him in the tub. To her surprise the dog didn’t try to escape but sat down and waited for the water level to rise.

  “You’ve had a bath before and liked it,” she said.

  When the dog’s fur was damp, Hana squeezed out a generous portion of expensive shampoo and made a thick lather. Once the puppy had been thoroughly washed, she used a handheld shower nozzle to rinse off the suds. The dog seemed to love every opportunity to interact with water. Hana used an old towel to dry him, but that didn’t keep the puppy from vigorously shaking himself from head to tail. The fragrance of the shampoo filled the bathroom.

  Returning to the kitchen, Hana found a few pieces of thin-sliced roast beef and placed them on a plate on the floor. The dog scarfed down the meat. Hana realized she was woefully unprepared for a four-legged guest. Grabbing her purse, she picked up the dog and walked outside to her car. It was now dark. When she flipped on the car’s headlamps, she thought she saw a pair of glowing eyes in the wooded area the puppy had emerged from. The eyes disappeared, but not before causing Hana to decide there was no way she could send the puppy back into the forbidding forest, even if it was only a hundred feet deep.