Exile: a novel

by Richard North Patterson

  “It’s good that you still care. I was hoping you would, so I’ve already drafted a statement. Want to hear it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Here goes: ‘Like every decent American, I grieve the loss of Amos Ben-Aron, a man I knew and deeply admired. And, like every American, I expect our government to conduct a full and impartial inquiry into the terrible circumstances of his murder.’ That’s the preamble, David. Still with me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here’s your escape hatch: ‘Hana Arif is an acquaintance from law school, as is her husband, Saeb Khalid. Before any charges were brought, and before I became aware of the circumstances alleged in the indictment, Ms. Arif and her husband asked me for advice. In light of those charges, I will help Ms. Arif obtain a lawyer to give her the defense that our system accords everyone, regardless of the crime with which they are charged. As soon as I have done so, my obligation to the legal system will be over, and my brief involvement in this matter at an end.’ ” Grimly, Newman added, “That’s the very best I can do.”

  David flashed on Hana sitting in a stark white room, shoulders sagging as he said, I’ll find you a good lawyer. “Sounds good enough,” he forced himself to say.

  “Then I’ll get it out tonight,” Newman said with obvious relief. “And have your assistant refer all media calls to me. Let’s keep your name beneath the fold, okay?”

  “Suits me,” David said, and took the exit ramp for the Marina District.

  Carole was sitting at his kitchen table wearing a robe, sipping black coffee, Newman’s press release in front of her. Without preface, she said, “You’ve talked to Burt, I guess.”

  David sat across from her—an eerie echo, to him, of his meeting with Hana Arif. “Yes. As promised, I’m getting out.”

  Carole’s dark eyes, her most expressive feature, betrayed the doubt and worry behind the mask of patience she was trying to maintain. “It’s really not about that. I know you—at least I think I do. But there’s something here I don’t quite get.”

  Feeling both sympathetic and defensive, David asked, “What’s that?”

  “Your concern for this woman, and even her child.”

  “It’s not that hard,” David temporized. “Hana stands to lose her life; Munira stands to lose her mother.”

  “Just who is she to you, David?”

  Briefly, David exhaled. “I told you.”

  “Did you? Then look me in the face and tell me that what you’ve already said is all there ever was.”

  David gazed into her face, so familiar and now, on his account, so troubled. “I can’t,” he said finally.

  Carole seemed to flinch. “You were lovers.”

  “Yes. Only for a few months, at the very end of law school.” David felt as uncomfortable at this confession as he sounded. “Saeb never knew. No one did.”

  Carole turned from him. “My father tried,” she said at last. “But sometimes he couldn’t help remaining hidden, going somewhere no one could reach him. So when I met you, I was used to that—conditioned to it, maybe. I told myself that your distance, and what I sometimes felt was a lack of passion, didn’t mean that you weren’t warm. Just as the essence of my father is warmth, not distance.” Her voice was parched, its note of reproval seemingly directed at herself. “You were so pleasant, so smart. And I knew about your parents—that they’d left their mark, as mine did. None of us are Adam and Eve, I told myself. But I never thought that how you are with me could be about some other woman.”

  David felt shaken. “Have I really been that bad?”

  “Bad? I wouldn’t love you if I didn’t believe you had the capacity to love. But in all the time I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you do anything reckless, or even unconsidered.”

  “No?” David tried to smile. “Not even with Marnie Sharpe?”

  Carole faced him. “Tell me this. If Hana’s husband was in trouble, this man that both of you deceived, would you help him?”

  “No.”

  Carole glanced away, as though it hurt to look at him. “You loved her that much.”

  At first, David could say nothing. “It’s done,” he offered softly. “However you want to characterize it, it’s done.”

  “Is it?” Tears stung Carole’s eyes. “From her picture on the news tonight, she’s stunning. For all I know, you and she rewrote the Kama Sutra between classes.”

  “Enough, Carole. This goes nowhere.”

  “Oh, it’s gone somewhere. It’s gotten us here—you at the federal detention center, me wondering about my peasant girl’s body, and which piece of you is missing.” Carole stood, hurt filling her voice. “Damn you, David. It must have broken your heart to find out what she’s done.”

  “I don’t know what she’s done,” David burst out. “I wish I did—it would have spared me hurting you and hating myself for it.”

  Carole watched his face. “You are so lost, David. You can’t accept the truth, and you’re not even sure where you belong.”

  “That,” David said with real anger, “is not fair. I grant you, this has shaken me to the core—you flatter yourself that you knew someone, and then suddenly something happens that causes you to question everything you believed about them, even things you knew about yourself. But that makes me human, not lost. And it’s absurd to think the answer is just to tell myself I’m Jewish, and move on.

  “Okay, you’re not the first woman I ever loved. Sorry. I’m not your first guy, either; some paragon of Israeli manhood beat me to it. The difference is that Hana came back to haunt me in a truly spectacular way, and not by any choice of mine. For that, I’m sorrier than you know. But at least let me get my balance—”

  The telephone rang. Instinctively, David glanced at the phone on the kitchen wall, reading its ID pad. “I’d better get that,” he said tiredly. “It’s your dad.”

  “Let me, David.”

  Carole stood, taking a moment to pull herself together, then answered with a fair show of calm. “Yes, Dad. I know.”

  Listening, Carole gazed at the floor. “I understand,” she said at last. “I feel that way, too. But you know David—he has principles of his own, and we love him for it. In fact, we’re kind of in the middle of this right now, sorting it out, or else I’d put him on. But no one disagrees—David can’t defend this woman, and doesn’t want to. It’s a matter of finding a quick and graceful exit.”

  Hearing Carole calm her father, preserving peace among the three of them at whatever cost to truth, David felt a deep sadness. Carole said goodbye to Harold and hung up the phone. “You were more than graceful,” David said gently. “Thank you for that.”

  Carole shook her head. “Two hours,” she said sadly, “and it’s killing him. Both of us, really.

  “We are Jewish, David. Dad and I are Americans by choice. But we’re Jewish just because we are. That’s how the world’s always seen us, and always will. No matter how hard he tried, my father would never understand your relationship with Hana Arif.”

  David went to her, holding her close to him. “Can you?”

  Though Carole did not hug him, she allowed him to rest her face on his shoulder. “I’ll try. But you have to help me, David. It’s like you can’t find your way out.”

  “There’s a way out,” he tried to reassure her. “Burt’s releasing the statement tonight.”

  “And then what?” Carole asked softly.

  Silent, David held her close.

  8

  The next morning’s newspapers suggested that Newman’s triage was working. It was Hana’s stricken mug shot that drew the eyes. While both the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times mentioned David’s involvement, each reported that it was temporary, his name a footnote in the columns of newsprint devoted to the charges against Hana Arif. And by the evidence of David’s office voice mail, he had drawn a field of applicants to serve as Hana’s lawyer—although, in David’s disheartened estimate, all but one were too young, old, desperate, alcoholic, inept, radical, or ob
sessed with the spotlight to entrust with a defense so arduous and demanding. The exception, Max Salinas, filled David with unease; a devoted leftist, Salinas often put the cause— as defined by his sense of drama—ahead of his client. But however quirky, Salinas was experienced and skilled, and David was in no position to dismiss him out of hand. So he drove to Washington Square, where Salinas, a man of the people, liked to sip espresso on a wooden bench and watch the denizens of the park read Lawrence Ferlinghetti, toss Frisbees to their dogs, or nap beside the grocery bags that contained their sole possessions.

  Salinas himself was easy to spot—a short, squat man with a sloping belly, a shrewd Aztec face, and silver hair drawn back in a ponytail. He regarded David from his bench with the jaded scrutiny of the proletarian for the haute bourgeois. But Salinas also had not forgotten, David was quite sure, the nerve-racking trial in which David, then a prosecutor, had secured for Max’s cocaine-dealer client an extended stretch in prison.

  David sat down next to him. “Yeah,” Salinas said without preface, “I can see why you don’t want this one.”

  “Give the class struggle a rest, Max. She needs somebody good, which is why I’m here. Let’s try to make sense of this.”

  Salinas shrugged. “Simple enough. There’s two ways to defend her: technical or contextual.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Technical is the same old song and dance—burden of proof, reasonable doubt, guilty until proven innocent. Taking the indictment, it goes like this: what Hassan told Jefar about Hana Arif is hearsay, and one slip of paper with fingerprints and a cell phone number, and a single call to that same number, doesn’t prove conspiracy to murder beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s where you start, but it’s not enough.”

  “Agreed. So what’s your context?”

  Salinas eyed a spindly Chinese man leading a small group of seniors in a somewhat arthritic version of tai chi. “That fascist you used to work for needs a conviction. Her masters, from the president on down, need a body to sacrifice on the altar of the State of Israel and Amos Ben-Aron. Your law school friend is readymade—Palestinian, allegedly associated with terrorists, a professor in a university filled with radicals from Al Aqsa and Hamas. Never mind that the Zionists have been butt-fucking the Palestinians for the last three generations.”

  “Is that part of your summation? Or just a paraphrase?” When Max looked at him in annoyance, David added, “Seriously, how do you turn that into a defense?”

  “By not running from the fact she’s Palestinian. People don’t know their story. So let the jury hear it: dispossession, massacres in refugee camps, and now the occupation—Jews stealing their land and water, keeping their kids in prison without trials, and generally squeezing the life out of three-plus million Palestinians.” Salinas’s body began to twitch with energy. “Sharpe lays out the official, government-approved white man’s version of history. And then we lay out Hana’s.”

  David examined the grass at their feet. “And then what? Listening to you, I’m almost ready to kill somebody myself. But how do you get all that into evidence? If I’m Marnie, I object like hell. Unless she decides you’re making her case for her.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that you may persuade twelve jurors that Hana had a motive.” David glanced at Max sideways. “If the jury pool were confined to San Francisco—nonwhite, nonaffluent, and so liberal that the Green Party out-polls Republicans—you’d have a shot. If anyone can make Ben-Aron the oppressor and Hana the victim, it’s you.

  “But this case is in federal court. Unless you get a change of venue, the jury pool will come from the entire populace of northern California, including white folks, conservative retirees, ex–military officers, and citizens who still believe that our government tends to prosecute the guilty.”

  “I can turn them around. Not that many people are that brain-dead anymore.”

  “Maybe. But what your defense implies, without saying so, is that this is a case of justifiable homicide—or, at the least, that the jury should consider Hana Arif as much a victim as Amos Ben-Aron. Given his image as a peacemaker, that’s a stretch. Throw in a dead Israeli security guy and a murdered American Secret Service agent with three kids under ten, and you’re taking a real chance.”

  Salinas folded his arms. “So,” he said, “you and I disagree. No surprise there, either—we come from different places. But ask yourself what choice you’ve got. This woman has no money, the public defender’s overworked, most lawyers who are any good won’t touch an impoverished female terrorist, those that want her will likely have my politics but not my tools, and you, David, need to get away from Hana Arif as quickly as you can.”

  That last remark rankled David, and also troubled him. “So what do you suggest, Max?”

  “Let me meet with her.” In profile, Salinas’s lips formed a somewhat wintry smile. “She’s the one they’re going to execute, not you. Let her decide.”

  David tried to imagine Salinas and Hana, facing each other in the bare white room. “I’ll talk to her,” he finally said.

  Nodding, Salinas sat back, gazing across the street at the ornate white marble Church of Saints Peter and Paul, an airy, stained glass gem built on the sweat of the city’s first Italian immigrants. “I read where you’re getting married,” Salinas said. “The society pages gave it quite a spread.”

  “I didn’t know you read them.”

  “Only when I run out of things to dislike,” Salinas answered. He pointed at the church. “Did you know that’s where Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe? A real prick, DiMaggio.”

  David promised to get back to him.

  The fifteen-minute drive to Senator Betsy Shapiro’s Tudor manse in the enclave of Presidio Terrace seemed to cover miles of psychic distance. That he was responding to her urgent message, left while David met with Salinas, increased his sense of disquiet.

  Betsy sat in her living room—decorated in the Chippendale style, redolent of New England, which David had also found curious in the home of his Jewish parents, Betsy’s friends. But Betsy, like his parents, had good taste, as well as the good sense not to adorn her walls with portraits of horses, bloodhounds, and British gentry riding to the hunt. The senator herself, in slacks and a silk blouse, was as informal as she allowed herself to be except with her closest friends.

  “Dumb,” she told David after the housekeeper had brought tea in china cups. “Truly, colossally, dumb.”

  It was less a condemnation than a statement of fact. “Granted,” David answered. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

  “So I surmised from your artfully worded press release.” Betsy’s tone became arid. “Although you were aware, as I recall, of who the victim was. I hope by now you’ve found a lawyer for her.”

  “I’m still working on it.”

  “Then let me encourage you to work harder.” Betsy took a sip of tea. “The immediate political damage is obvious. But there are more subtle pitfalls that you may not have grasped. Have you ever been to Israel?”

  “No.”

  “I visit there quite a lot, for reasons both professional and personal. I also serve on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. I can’t discuss classified information, and I don’t claim to know—at least prior to our inevitable congressional investigation—who, besides the two assassins and Arif, may have murdered Amos Ben-Aron. But I do have a certain perspective.

  “That his murder stirs the deepest passions of our own Jewish community is, again, obvious—I’d be shocked if you haven’t confronted that in your family-to-be. But my deeper concerns only start there.” The senator raised her eyebrows in admonition. “A week or so ago, on television, you floated the idea of a breach in Ben-Aron’s personal security. I cautioned you about it then, and for good reason: I believe that it happened.”

  At once, David felt his lawyer’s instincts surface. “Why?”

  “Because thus far—and this is between us—the FBI and Secret Service can’t find
any deficiency in our procedures. Nor can they find any cop or agent with serious financial problems, or with some grievance with Israel or Ben-Aron. And yet, as you seem to have detected, his route to the airport did change at the last minute, and the bombers changed their location before they could have observed the changes occurring—as Ibrahim Jefar’s story suggests.” Shapiro pursed her lips, as though tasting something sour. “Maybe they were lucky. But it creates the real possibility of an inadvertent—or deliberate—breach on the Israeli side.”

  “Can the Justice Department find out?”

  “Not easily. At least for now, whatever the Israelis are doing is buttoned up tight—for their own good reason.” Shapiro paused, then continued in the pointed tones she used for recalcitrant witnesses and feckless bureaucrats. “Your suggestion goes to the heart of Israel’s internal conflicts. The right wing, including the settler movement and those most rabidly anti-Palestinian, is using the assassination to gain and hold power. The only way I can see for the opposition to fight back—the moderates, the left, the peace movement—is to find a way to blame the Israeli right for Ben-Aron’s assassination.

  “If that happens, the accusation itself could tear Israel apart along the fault lines of its very fractious society—left versus right, secular versus Orthodox, settler versus nonsettler. And those same fault lines will divide friends in our own community—people like Harold Shorr on one side and me on the other, with anger overtaking reason.”

  “I can see that.”

  Betsy stared at him. “Good. Because you do not want to be part of provoking that. It would damage you politically, losing you friends you’ll never get back. And for what? Hana Arif? I don’t see how that helps her.”

  Carefully, David sipped his herbal tea. “Let me suggest a possibility. If there was a deliberate breach on the Israeli side, then someone potentially within our reach holds the key to what happened, and who was behind it—”

  “Either Arif conspired to kill him,” Betsy interjected sharply, “or she didn’t. From the prosecutor’s perspective, who else may have helped to kill him doesn’t matter. At least until Arif tells us who they are, assuming that she can.”