“Now they are gathered on the West Bank, still occupied by Israeli soldiers. My parents still wait in Lebanon. Only Saeb and I were able to leave for the West Bank, and then the Zionists closed Birzeit University before we could study there. And so,” Hana continued with a smile that was no smile, “with the help of the refugee agency of the United Nations, Israel’s creator, and some scholarship money, we washed up on the shores of America, the openhearted patron of those who displaced us. Where I carry on my people’s struggle by engaging in foolish debates with those whose notion of Arabs comes from the novel Exodus, and who see our history as a western in which Israel is Jimmy Stewart and Saeb and I are Indians.” Hana caught herself, summoning a bitter smile. “You asked. But perhaps you did not wish for an answer quite so comprehensive.”
“I did ask,” David said simply. “And you exaggerate.”
To his surprise, her smile became more wistful than resentful. “I wish it were so. But I’ve learned to hope for nothing.”
“And Saeb?”
“Has his own history.” She looked briefly down again, pensive. “I’m not ready to talk about him, David.”
Surprised by the tacit intimacy of his name on her lips, David tried to decipher what lay beneath her answer, and then the waiter appeared with steaming plates of beef chow mein and cooked vegetables. Serving them both, Hana said, “So I’ve become this contradictory person, a semi-observant Muslim leftist. Not because I embrace the Communists but because only the left seems determined to give us what we want.”
David sampled the chow mein, more flavorful than the paucity of customers would suggest. “Which is?”
“A homeland. Our land returned to us. If Jews want to live among us, they can. But not in a Jewish ghetto called Israel, one that oppresses and excludes us.”
“There are negotiations going on,” David objected. “Arafat and Prime Minister Rabin already have agreed to let the PLO take over the civil governance of Gaza and the West Bank. A start toward your own country.”
“We’ll see,” Hana answered with weary resignation. “More likely our children will someday have the same discussion. And it will be as academic to your child as it is to you.”
David did not know what moved him next. He had always lived the circumscribed life of the American upper classes—professional parents; privileged friends; elite schools. The women he had dated, though of varied personalities and, at times, neuroses, were of the same class, with similar aspirations comfortably supported by similar families. But this woman had passion and experiences David Wolfe had never encountered, and it seemed to draw from him his own small spark of rebellion.
Whatever it was, he reached out and covered her hand with his. “Not academic. Not to me.”
For a long time, she gazed down at his hand on hers, though she made no move to withdraw it. “This is complicated.” Her voice was soft, muffled. “You have no idea how much.”
“Then tell me.”
“I’m pledged to Saeb.” She drew a breath, still looking down. “I’m Muslim. Wherever my home will be, Muslim women do not have men who are not Muslim. Let alone a Jewish man.
“There are rules. Women represent the honor of their family, as I represent mine.” She looked up at him, eyes clouded. “That I even let you touch me stains their honor.”
“But not yours, Hana. We’re people, you and I.”
She shook her head. But still she did not move her hand. “We can’t afford to be. You can’t afford to be. The price could be too great.”
David gazed into her dark eyes, filled with uncertainty and even fear. Then he gave an answer that, when he recalled it later, seemed as blithely, blindly American as it must have seemed to her. A statement invincibly David Wolfe at twenty-five in its ignorance of pain.
“I want to see you, Hana, as often as you’ll let me. I’ll take my chances with the rest.”
5
With an underhand flip, Iyad tossed his old cell phone into the swift, powerful current of San Francisco Bay. “Perhaps years from now,” he said in chill tones, “they’ll find it in Hawaii. Long after our people retake Jerusalem and dig up what pieces they had left of him to bury.”
They stood at Fort Point, the foot of the massive concrete pillars beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, an orange-painted span that jutted above them into the fog creeping from the ocean through the narrow passage to the bay. Ibrahim’s sense of living a surreal nightmare deepened; he felt like an automaton, being moved to ever more alien locations by someone who did not even acknowledge his existence. How had he come to be in this place, he asked himself, with this man, on the eve of his death? He knew nothing but what Iyad deigned to tell him—that their enemy was coming; that the woman would soon place the weapons of destruction in their hands.
But how? So many hated their quarry that he lived in a steel cocoon, guarded by a handpicked elite chosen from the Zionist army, ruthless men with reflexes for killing. Standing in this place unarmed, his only link to humanity a laconic, hate-filled zealot, Ibrahim felt as naked as Salwa before the insolent soldiers...
He still could see the checkpoint, clear as yesterday—it stretched for miles, cars and trucks backed up in a relentless heat that baked the parched earth and asphalt. His sister lay in the back seat of the car, belly swollen and face contorted in agony, her flowing skirt pulled up around her waist to expose what a brother should not see. “Please, God,” she kept pleading, “please don’t let us die.”
Eyes shut, Ibrahim had grasped her hand. Now Salwa lived, her mind as empty as her womb.
Iyad’s new cell phone rang.
“Don’t be cute, David.” Marnie Sharpe used her most caustic tone. “Don’t tell me this bullshit trick doesn’t have your fingerprints all over it.”
They sat in the United States attorney’s corner office in the federal building: Sharpe at her desk, David facing her in a chair that was none too comfortable. Sharpe and David had a history, and now they were playing it out.
The year before, Sharpe had asked for, and promptly received, David’s resignation as an assistant United States attorney. Their problems had begun with rancid chemistry. David sometimes found the vagaries of law amusing; little amused Marnie Sharpe. She had carried into her mid-forties a humorless single-mindedness, Spartan habits, and no known passions save for her personal vision of justice, as inviolate as a family might be to someone else. When he had worked for her, David had tried to imagine Marnie Sharpe making love to anyone, man or woman, and failed utterly. The label for Sharpe he settled on was “armadillo.”
They could have survived this. Marnie was a good lawyer, and in his better moments David could work up sympathy for anyone who needed a carapace so thick. But the death penalty had done them in.
Sharpe believed in it; David did not. He had refused to seek it in the murder of an eight-year-old girl by a child molester who had himself been sexually abused and tortured by his father and who was, David knew, borderline retarded. After David’s resignation, his successor, following Sharpe’s instructions, had sought and secured a death sentence. Asked by a reporter to comment, David had not restrained himself. “This murder was a sickening tragedy. But were I Ms. Sharpe, I’d reserve the death penalty for men smart enough to know what dying means.”
This sealed their mutual dislike. To Marnie Sharpe, David Wolfe put his own rarified sensibilities above the law; to David, the U.S. attorney did not admit, even to herself, that her zeal for the death penalty was intended to endear her to those who dole out federal judgeships. That he was now a defense lawyer worsened their dynamic, allowing David to use the one gift in his toolbox Marnie did not possess: the imagination to exploit the ambiguities of a legal system that Sharpe saw as a blueprint. Throw David Wolfe into a legal thicket, and what he saw were escape routes.
All of which had led to the gambit that brought them together now: the chance to frustrate Sharpe in the interests of a client who, but for David, might be on his way to an extended term in prison. But lurki
ng beneath this was a purpose just as serious: David’s absolute conviction that Marnie Sharpe should never wield the power invested in a federal judge, as deep as her own belief that he should never be a congressman.
“I’m not here to be chastised,” David told her calmly. “In fact, I’m wondering why I’m here at all.”
She shot him a look of irritation. “We have an eight-million-dollar Brinks robbery. Your client was caught. All he had to offer was ‘The Mafia made me do it.’ ”
“ ‘Or they’d kill me,’ ” David amended. “Raymond thought that part was important. So do I.” He spread his hands. “It’s a first offense, and you’re charging Ray Scallone with everything but planning 9/11. He’s a tool—”
“He’s a goon who threatened a security guard with a Saturday night special. He needs to be off the street.”
David shrugged. “So let’s work out a deal or try the case.”
“Why should I cut a deal? I suppose because someone, not from our office, leaked to the press that we—which is to say the FBI—were investigating whether the Mafia was connected to this robbery. We weren’t investigating any such connection—”
“Then you should have—”
Sharpe spoke over him. “But after Channel 5 reported this so-called Mafia connection, the FBI started to investigate the possibility. Then, coincidentially enough, you demanded access to all the records of its investigation, claiming that they were vital to Scallone’s defense.”
“They are his defense,” David said. “After all, you did catch him with the money. So why didn’t you just turn over the records?”
“There are no records that would help Scallone,” Sharpe retorted. “There is no evidence that the Mafia threatened anyone. But now you’ve filed a motion to dismiss the entire case, claiming that you can’t put on a proper defense without knowing why the FBI launched an investigation of what turns out to be vapor—just as if you didn’t know.” She paused, fixing David with a gelid stare. “Any sane judge would use this motion to line their cat box. Any judge who was still breathing would have wondered who the source was for this serendipitous ‘leak.’ But you’ve lucked into ‘Kick-’Em-Loose Bruce’ Myers, the last hemophiliac on the federal bench.”
David shrugged again. “Beats a necrophiliac, I suppose.”
This tacit reference to the death penalty caused Sharpe’s eyes to narrow. “You know what’s happening here, David. And so do I.”
“I’m hoping so,” he responded blandly. “I’m willing to discuss a plea if you are.”
Sharpe sat back, considering him in silence. David took this for what it was: a concession that, however distasteful, cutting a deal might be preferable to what Judge Myers might do with David’s motion. “Based on what, dare I ask? Your bogus motion?”
“No. Based on a mutual respect and our common dislike of overprosecution.” David smiled faintly. “Except in death penalty cases, of course. We’ll save that for another time.”
An hour later, David left the federal building, hurrying back to his office to meet Carole.
He should be satisfied—whatever grudge Marnie Sharpe might hold, he had done his job as a lawyer. But the confrontation left a sour residue, a toxic admixture with the emotions stirred by Hana’s call. Perhaps, he thought, it was the memory of his own fallibility, the painful lesson, first learned through Hana Arif, that the consequence of his actions might be far different than he intended, or even imagined.
It’s just a case, he told himself—not a love affair. The only consequences, if any, would lie in his next case against Marnie Sharpe. He would deal with it then.
6
Within moments of entering his office, Carole Shorr stopped talking about their wedding, cocked her head as though recalibrating her sense of David’s mood, and abruptly asked, “How has your day been? You seem a little distracted.”
David was forced to smile. Carole was very good at reading others— including, in many if not all ways, David himself. But this was not the right occasion for unvarnished truth. “Why shouldn’t I be?” he answered amiably. “We just set a date. I’m getting married in seven months, at the age of thirty-eight. In a huge wedding. I’m both too old and too young for that sort of thing, and suddenly I’m on the conveyor belt to fatherhood. Which I find a little daunting.”
Carole grinned, good humor restored. As if seeing her for the first time in days—which, given the events of his morning, did not seem that far off—David found himself studying the woman he soon would marry. Carole had a full, curvaceous figure, wavy brown hair, and a pretty, wholesome face, complicated by the deep brown pools of eyes whose almond shape carried a hint of Eurasia, once prompting David to suggest to her that some female Polish ancestor had been ravaged by a Tatar passing through her village. Though her expression was habitually pleasant, it had a resolute cast, suggesting the planner and organizer she was. The Carole Shorr School of Management, David once told her, was what America truly needed.
“The world,” she had amended cheerfully. “If only I had the time.”
Certainly, Carole Shorr managed her slice of the world with consummate practicality and efficiency. She was smart and socially adept, with an assertive charm that made people like her and, more often than not, do what she wanted. She leavened her determination with a warm, sometimes lightly flirtatious manner, mixed with humor. All this added up to a gift for knowing the influentials of the Jewish community, the Democratic Party, and, at times, the larger world, without the sharp elbows or avidity that would have made her a figure of sport or envy.
All of which made her indispensable to David. Beyond this, only he was privileged to know that she was sexy not just in manner but in fact, with an openness that had, at first, surprised him. And only he saw Carole’s vulnerability—a deep desire to be needed, to be cherished and respected by a partner she knew to be her peer.
“Oh, I know,” Carole told him now. “It’s so hard being a guy.” Glancing at her watch, she picked up her purse and stood. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything. Including having the babies.”
David snatched the suit coat off the back of his chair. “Good. I’m best at delegation.”
“Just do your part. Sort of like you did this morning.” Abruptly, her expression became more probing. “So what did happen between then and now? Something.”
David opened his door, waving her past his secretary’s empty desk. “Have I mentioned that you are a remarkably perceptive woman? Relentlessly so.”
Carole laughed. “As soon as we’re married, I promise to change. Until then you’ll have to put up with my sensitivity to your moods.”
They reached the elevator to the parking garage. Pushing the button, David said, “You’ll remember I was meeting with Marnie Sharpe.”
“It didn’t go so well?”
The elevator opened. Carole stepped inside, then David. “Given that she hates me,” he answered, “it never goes well. I got what I wanted. But not before Marnie accused me of leaking to the press some fiction about an FBI investigation, then exploiting it to knock years off my client’s sentence.”
“And did you?”
David smiled. “Of course. But it still hurt.”
Carole gave him a dubious look. “Isn’t that unethical?”
“Not to me. And it’s certainly not illegal.” Pausing, he spoke more seriously. “First, I believe Raymond’s story, though a lawyer believes clients at his peril. Second, the FBI should have investigated. Truth to tell, I didn’t know what the FBI was doing. I only knew what they should be doing. Sharpe wouldn’t listen to me. So I decided to encourage the FBI by other means.” David smiled again. “Any lawyer can succeed with an innocent client. The guilty require imagination.”
Carole gazed at him with a bemusement. “To a simple girl like me, David, you sometimes sound immoral. I see this glint in your eye, and for a minute I’m not sure I know you.”
The elevator door opened to a cavernous underground garage. “Don’t feel alo
ne,” David consoled her blithely. “My mother never knew me. Not that I knew her, either.
“But seriously, Sharpe deserved it. She overprosecutes, and she loves convictions more than truth. Lawyers should be forced to take a Rorschach test before we allow them to be prosecutors.”
They found Carole’s green Jaguar convertible—British, not German, she had emphasized to David. She inserted her key in the ignition, then turned to him again. “Can we talk for a minute? Dad will understand if we’re a little late.”
“I thought we were talking.”
“Deploying words isn’t always the same as talking.” She gazed at the dashboard, gathering her thoughts. “Listening to this story, I wonder about your defending criminals—okay, alleged criminals—two years before you run for Congress.”
“Even if I think they’re innocent?”
“Even then, unfortunately. You’ll probably get by with this case—at least Ray Scallone didn’t murder that guard. But you’re already on the ‘wrong’ side of the death penalty issue.”
“Most voters in my district,” David objected, “don’t like executions.”
“Maybe not. But some do. Most Californians do, and they elect U.S. senators.”
David smiled at this. “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves? Why not president?”
“The first Jewish president?” she answered briskly. “It’s about time.”
“I thought you were about to say ‘semi-Jewish.’ Anyhow, criminal law is what I like.”
Carole touched his hand. “I know. And the Jewish part we can work on. But sometimes, it feels like you think you’re immune to disaster, or even hurt, as if God’s given you a pass.”
Exile: a novel Page 4