When The Butterflies Come

by Rosemary Ness Bitner

  “You know, I’m so impressed with your work, I’d like you to do some legal work for me after we settle this mess.” David was on a roll. “The way I see it is like this. Here you are, risking your practice and reputation in the Jewish community by helping this gentile. Why not take a sure settlement, get paid for all you’ve done and all Sol did, and then I’ll let you have some easy work and I’ll pay you some more. Doesn’t that make more sense than rolling the dice?”

  “David, it’s not about fighting against Israel. Do you see Israel named as a defendant? It’s a fight of Bob against you, David, against the wrong you’ve caused my client, the wrong to his career, to his new business, all the harassments, all the vindictiveness. What made you decide to take off on Bob like you did?”

  “Well, I just didn’t want to see him stealing something that was going to belong to Israel. We’re both Jews. I’m sure you can understand my feelings.”

  “Bob’s a Jew as well, David. You even witnessed his conversion. Let’s just keep money as the issue here.”

  “He’s not a Jew! He’s just a Reformed, a wannabe Jew. Reformed Jews aren’t real Jews! They are just fuckups! I offered to help him get an Orthodox rabbi and he didn’t want to take me up on it. He didn’t want to be a real Jew!”

  “What if he had, David? Would you then have pushed him to become Hasidic? Where would it all stop, David? You just wanted to make him into your boy-toy, didn’t you? You wanted a fuck-buddy, something besides that black sheep of yours, didn’t you? What’s the matter? The sheep won’t talk to you? Not intimate enough? And he rejected you, didn’t he? That’s really what all this is about, isn’t it?”

  “He’s not a Jew!” David shouted. “Reformed Jews aren’t real Jews!”

  “He’s as much a Jew as you or me or any other Jew. Stop the fucking nonsense. He knows Torah, Tanakh, the services, the Holidays, the mitzvahs, all of it. He knows it as well as you and me, probably even more so. We’re here to talk money, David. I can’t bring him back to you. It’s over. Whatever fantasy you had about him, it’s over. It’s just about money now.”

  Five thousand years before men penned the Declaration of Independence, which gave birth to a republic founded upon secular principles, God’s words were forever etched in the minds of Jews. God’s words as spoken to Abraham were decidedly non-secular and excluded those who were not of blood issue.

  “It can’t be just about money. It’s about Judaism also. If Bob is really a Jew, he should know I could never leave him Dad’s companies, my companies, Israel’s companies.”

  “How can you say that? When you made the deal with him, he was a gentile. You concealed from him your pledge to Marvin that you would leave the companies to Israel upon your death. Then, after you took away the codicil you showed him in the bank vault, you were telling salesmen in Bob’s presence that Bob would inherit the companies. You knew that wasn’t true, but you repeated it to several different salesmen at different times so they’d keep selling fund shares. So you’ve got fraud written all over you, plus violations of the Securities Distribution Act. How could Bob know any of this?”

  “Well, he knows now, yet he keeps after me in court. And he became a Jew, so he says, so you say, so some stupid Reformed rabbis say. Well then, he should know the meaning of the story of Abraham!”

  “Excuse me. I must be missing something. The deal you made was made under twentieth-century secular laws. It was not made under Torah laws five thousand years ago.”

  “He testified he’s a Jew! He isn’t stupid. He knows when God and Abraham made their berit, their covenant between the cut-up animals, that God told Abraham that his own issue shall be his heir.”

  “That was about Ishmael and Isaac. Later Abraham and Sarah had Isaac. Sarah and Isaac pushed out Hagar and Ishmael because their blood wasn’t pure Hebrew. Don’t try to rationalize what you did to my client by playing the Jew card. It’s not going to fly. You made a secular deal. You made a covenant deal, one man to another under secular law, and you broke the fucking deal, David. It’s clear. You live in the United States of America, not in the land of Ur or the land of Canaan. Besides, Abraham pimped his wife to the pharaoh for food stamps, so maybe Moses’s bloodlines didn’t have pure Hebrew blood either. I don’t think you’re using a great example to invoke sanctimonious purity and integrity in your dealings. If anybody should be trusted to give those companies to Israel, it should be Bob. Your intent was to sell them and go spend the money. You have no honor, David.”

  “God also told Abraham that his descendants would people many lands and inherit great wealth. Your client is not a descendent of Abraham. I did not cut a covenant deal with Bob. We did not cut the animals and agree over their bodies and their blood. A deal that is not a covenant deal is no deal at all. What I did with Bob was to enhance the gift my father left me to give to Israel. That was the only agreement that mattered. Goyim think their laws matter. That’s not my problem. Only a covenant, a bris, matters. When we were in the bank vault, Bob was a gentile. Your own words acknowledge that. That makes his deal a secular goy deal, not a covenant deal. I merely made use of a fool, but I made no deal.”

  “Cut out the bullshit. Wahhabi Muslims use that thinking to justify taking from those who are outside of Islam. This is tribal thinking you’re spewing, but we now live in a secular world. God said a lot of stuff to a lot of people and you can use scripture to rationalize anything, but we live under secular laws. Learn the story of Ruth.”

  “I know it.”

  “Well, Bob fits that scripture story.”

  “The Ruth story is bullshit. Reformed rabbis use it to justify conversions.” David wasn’t about to let Ben make him feel empathy for Bob.

  “Don’t get so righteous, David. Your roots are Khazarian, not Ashkenazi. Your tribe was forced to choose a religion so they’d stop thieving or the Turks were going to kill them. You’re not from the blood of Abraham either. You’re no different from Bob.” Ben liked to keep topics in sharp focus. He wasn’t about to let David mix logic.

  “My parents, their parents, belonged to a temple. Bob’s mother is not a Jewess,” David shouted like a hurt child. He scrambled to change the reference frame of his argument from where he’d started to one which had a timeline that more suited his rebuttal.

  “Let’s get down to business. The time for bullshitting about three-thousand-year-old Tanakh passages is over. Do we deal or go to trial? I assure you, every day that passes this case becomes more valuable, not less. It’s just about money.” Ben was getting tired of religious philosophy.

  “No! It’s not just about money!” David was still shouting, his face strained to beet red. “It’s about my dad, Marvin, and the promise I made to him. Marvin was a Zionist, you surely know that.”

  “I know that.”

  “And I’m a Zionist too. I just had a weak moment, that’s all. I made a mistake when I made my deal with Bob. Can’t a man make a mistake just once in his life? Can’t you see your way to help me get past a simple mistake? I’m an old man. I shouldn’t have to suffer so much. My heart isn’t good. My kidneys aren’t right. I have gout. My prostate needs to come out. All this is stressful and it’s hurting my health. It’s not human to put me through this. Let’s say we work something out where this all didn’t happen and nobody knows about it. We should be able to come up with something workable. You and Mal are smart lawyers. Come up with something reasonable.”

  “Reasonable means the Jewish community can’t know about your deal.”

  “Then you know these companies must go to Israel, especially now. Why did Sol and you ever take the case? No one needed to know what happened here. The secular laws of the United States are irrelevant in this matter! When it comes to Israel, it’s the laws of Torah that matter, nothing else. The mitzvahs matter, nothing else. There are no other laws, only God’s law. Nowhere in the mitzvahs does it say that you must honor your promises to a gentile. Goyim are beneath us! Fuck them, use them, and piss on their pathetic lives. It
doesn’t matter what we do to them. They don’t matter. Their laws don’t matter, and their lives don’t matter. Their country doesn’t matter. God is all that matters.”

  Ben wasn’t buying into David’s rationalizations. “David, you need a reality check. You are about to face a jury of your peers and they believe that their laws matter a great deal. Trust me, they will relish the chance to skewer a fat Jew who broke a deal. You are fucked, David. Stop kidding yourself. This isn’t about God or mitzvahs. It isn’t even about you giving the companies to Israel. You broke that deal. You might as well go piss on your father’s grave. You’ve made an inconceivable mess, David. Money is the only thing that can fix it now. It’s about money. You fucked up, fella.”

  “All right, since it’s about money, what about you, Ben? What about your money? I can’t believe your practice is going gangbusters. Be honest.”

  “It’s not about me, David. It’s about my client and, by the way, he’s pushing me to get a trial date set. Once I do that, there will be no settlement.”

  “Listen, we’re all trying to get to the same place here. We both want out of this case. You want your money, you need the money, and you want to move on.”

  Ben was suddenly paying attention. David struck a nerve. By the hourly rate Sol put into the case, Ben was out a fortune in fees he owed Sol and he couldn’t pay unless he won or settled. He looked at David and said nothing.

  David sensed he’d finally driven a wedge into Ben’s wall. Now he needed to take control of the meeting.

  “Look, I don’t begrudge you making a good living, Ben, but I don’t want to enrich a man for more than he was worth to me. I’m willing to put some serious money on the table for you, but you need to be a reasonable man. And we can’t go putting a stain on Israel.”

  “Tell me what you’re offering.”

  “It’s like this. I can sell my old lawyers up the river and deliver them to you on a silver platter. They did malpractice. I can prove it. My lawyer here can show you the stuff I have on them. I hired a malpractice expert to check over everything they did. There are many millions there. You agree to settle this case for what I’m offering, nothing more, and I’ll let you represent me afterward against my former lawyers, or you can just blackmail them and pocket the money yourself. Bob can have his costs back, nothing more. You’ll make more than your cut of a win at trial and you take no risk.”

  “That’s unethical. I can’t do that.” Ben bristled at the thought of betraying his client.

  David shouted, spittle flying, “What do you mean, unethical? You’re a fucking lawyer! All you cocksuckers are unethical. Look at it this way, Ben. If you don’t take my deal and you go forward, you could win, but you’ll still lose. I already have all my assets in offshore trusts and you’ll never find a dime of any of it. I’ll have my money moved to new jurisdictions every six months. I don’t care what it costs. Also, I’ve bribed a judge and a witness before and nothing stopped me. I’ll just do it again! I can’t believe you’ve been a lawyer all these years and still haven’t figured out that the legal system isn’t about making things right. The legal system is about helping rich guys screw little guys while you lawyers and judges get paid to make the crooked farce look honest. Bob is never going to see one dime above what I’m offering. I understand you need to get him some money to walk a deal past a judge, but that’s all he’s going to get.”

  “You can’t do this. What you’re offering for stealing a man’s life work is too little.”

  “Too little, you say. I’ve spent three and a half million and burned through fifty-four lawyers fighting you and Sol, you fucking morons. You are broke. Sol died broke. Everything he made as a lawyer he lost in the markets. He was a fucking idiot stock player. You want to help somebody, Ben? Help his widow. She’s a charity case. She could use some gleanings. You don’t have much either, Ben. I’ve checked. You and your wife are down to your last two hundred thousand. You haven’t taken home money for years. I bet your wife loves being broke.

  “Let me tell you about too little. If you go forward to trial, I’ll gladly spend another three million objecting, appealing, switching lawyers, filing frivolous motions you’ll need to respond to. I’ll run you into the ground, bankrupt you. I know this game better than you do. The big guy keeps spending the little guy into the ground until the little guy drops dead. I kind of like this game the more I play it. It reminds me of when I was a kid. I stepped on caterpillars and watched their guts squirt out. Then I scraped my shoes on the sidewalk and smeared their guts all over the place. I felt great fucking up those little caterpillars. That’s what I’ll do to you guys if you go forward, squash you like caterpillars. You will lose. I will destroy you and you will get nothing.”

  David made it clear to Ben that the nuanced factor in making his offer was the amount of money he needed to pay out of pocket to get the case past a judge. Anything above that he would not pay. He’d rather go to a scorched-earth strategy where Ben would get nothing even though David’s business would be tarred and possibly ruined, but David would keep the monies he had amassed through his nefarious dealings over the years.

  “Stop it. Bob’s a human being. He has lost his career and half his professional life because of you. For the sake of decency, think about what you’ve done.”

  “I don’t give a shit.” David slammed that door shut. Morality had no bank account.

  Ben tried a different approach to soften David’s resolve. “Let me ask you something, David. Why weren’t you honest with Bob from the start? Why didn’t you just say, ‘I made this promise to my father to leave these companies to Israel and I intend to keep it, so after ten years of great experience you’ll have to go somewhere else’? Why couldn’t you just make an up-front deal?”

  “My testimony and his testimony covered it. He was going to leave to go to Texas and take the Indian girl with him. He was going to abandon me after all I did for him. How else could I keep him?”

  “David, that’s just business. People move around. You don’t own people.”

  “It was more than business. He was like a son to me. I loved him. I treated him well. He was just going to take the Indian and leave me. What do you expect? I gave him a terrific opportunity to make good money.”

  “He made less than he was making before your phony deal, but let’s not belabor that. We have experts for that. What I want to know is why you didn’t settle this right away when your codicil was discovered. Why did you fight through five appeals courts? Surely you had to know you’d eventually lose. And why did you put crime scene tape over his office door after discovery was completed? Why did you personally destroy his desk with a hatchet after they left? And why did you forbid the employees from ever speaking his name? I guess he got to you, huh? I mean, if you were going to give the companies to Israel, why would you care so much and why destroy company property? Why did you take this so hard?”

  “I didn’t like feeling betrayed, that’s all. I got a little upset with him.” David looked away. He did that sometimes when he was caught off guard about not telling the truth.

  “I don’t believe you, David. If you cared about Israel, you would have prevented all this adverse publicity. It reflects terribly on Jews everywhere. You can’t sugarcoat what you did. People who find out about this will think we all do business this way. No, David, I believe you were taking calls from business brokers because you didn’t have any intention of keeping your pledge to your father. You didn’t have any intention of leaving the companies to Israel. You acted more like a jilted lover. You got emotional, didn’t you?

  “You were going to sell the companies. You were going to steal from Marvin, steal from Bob, and steal from Israel, weren’t you? All your father’s friends who put money into UGGA thinking they were helping Israel were going to be betrayed as well, weren’t they? You’re no different than a little kid stealing from a cookie jar, isn’t that true?”

  “I owned the companies. What I did with them was my business!” D
avid was animated, shouting once again. “Fuck Bob! Fuck his Indian girlfriend! Fuck Marvin! And fuck Israel! All my life it was ‘Marvin this, Marvin that. Look how handsome Marvin is. Isn’t Marvin so smart? Doesn’t Marvin do so much for the community? If you have a problem, see Marvin! Marvin! Marvin! Marvin!’ How much of Marvin’s shit is his son supposed to swallow? Everything was for his shiksa, everything was for Israel. Then I’m supposed to choke that down and also give the business to a goy? What about me? Was I too ugly to be loved? Fuck all of you. I don’t give a shit what the community thinks of me. Fuck them and their money. They made money in UGGA. They got no damages. They can’t sue. Those companies are mine. Mine!”

  David was shaken. He leaned forward into Ben’s face. “They are not going to Israel. I don’t give a shit about Israel! All my life, everything Dad did was for Israel. Well, I don’t even give a shit if the Muslims get Israel. I have no heirs. I don’t need a place to escape to. I don’t need Israel. It’s no skin off my nose!”

  “So you lied in your testimony that you intended to keep your promise to your father!” Ben sat back and responded calmly. “You never intended to leave the companies to Israel. Do you see what I can do to you on the witness stand? Even if we had an all-Jew jury, they’d all side with Bob after hearing what you just said.” He stared at David, as if he were seeing the defendant for the first time. Never had he known a Jew to say he didn’t care about Israel. Never did he know a man who didn’t care about his own soul.

  “Fuck off. If you go to trial with this, you may ruin me with the community, but I’ll ruin you too. The difference is I don’t give a shit.” David glared at Ben. He looked like a trapped, angry rat, but he wasn’t about to compromise.