The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx

by Arthur Nersesian

I’m Hoover,” the kid said. “

  “You’re the person who left me this note?” Paul asked, arching his eyebrows in annoyance. Hoover rose silently and led him into his office and closed the door.

  “Did you know one Carlo Valdinoci?” Hoover began.

  “You mean the fellow who bombed the attorney general’s home?”

  “I’m not going to pussyfoot around, Moses. I know you served honorably here. I know you work for Byrd & Hale. And I know you fought in Mexico alongside this wop. I’m not after you. We got the entire anarchist mailing list. We know who’s who and what’s what. Now, I don’t care if you fought against Porfirio Díaz, but I want some names and I want them now.”

  “I have to speak to my attorney first,” Paul replied, feeling only resentment toward this oily kid.

  “Mr. Moses. Either cooperate with us right here and now or, so help me God, the Attorney General’s Office will be the worst enemy you’ve ever had.”

  After a long pause, Paul exhaled and said, “I didn’t catch most of their last names. They were Italians. But I never even joined their fight.”

  Hoover took a legal pad and a fountain pen from his top desk drawer. “I’d like a complete timetable of when you arrived there. What missions you were on right up until you left. Then I want a list of first names or monikers of your confederates and basic descriptions of what they looked like and what they did.”

  Paul sighed and asked if he could have a few weeks to provide this information.

  “I want it right now or you’re under arrest. And if I feel that I’m getting anything other than the absolute truth, I’m going to press charges against you, and I guarantee I’ll make them stick.”

  “I did nothing wrong.”

  “The attorney general of this great republic was attacked a few days ago at his home. We are in the grips of terrible times, Mr. Moses.”

  “I’m truly sorry about that, but—”

  “Foreign agents have brought a war onto our shores and some of these bastards worked with you. I’m willing to overlook the possibility that you might very well be one of these sons of bitches, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you are no longer in cahoots with them—if you do everything you can right this moment to help us find them.” Hoover stared at Paul intensely.

  Paul let out another audible sigh. Reaching across the table, he took the pen and paper and slid them in front of himself. Only when Hoover rose did Paul realize that another, larger man was standing behind him. Over the next four hours, Paul drew up an approximate timetable of missions, along with a list of places where they occurred and others he had worked with, deliberately lying about the names of those who he knew were harmless. By the time Hoover’s assistant brought him a dry ham and cheese sandwich for dinner, Paul had come up with fourteen names, mainly Italian and Spanish, and one Russian—the late Vladimir Ustinov. By 10 o’clock that night, hours after Hoover had left, he was allowed to leave provided he return first thing the next morning.

  Paul came back at 9 a.m. and sat across from young Hoover, who reviewed all the facts and figures he had written on the legal pad pages.

  “Right now,” Hoover said, “I really have only one question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What the hell prompted a young man, someone who was an A student at Princeton, who comes from a position of wealth and privilege, to toss it all aside and go to Mexico to fight in some pointless wetback war?”

  “Well, to be honest with you,” Paul replied awkwardly, “I was in love with a girl and she brought me into it.”

  “I sensed that might be the answer,” Hoover said with a smile. “The only woman you can ever trust is your mother.”

  Paul smiled back, just wanting out.

  “All right, here’s the deal. A contingent of these foreigners who you broke bread with got munitions training south of the border and now they’re using it up here. If everything you told us checks out, no charges will be filed against you.” Looking Paul in the eye, Hoover pulled his seat forward and added, “But frankly, I’d like you to leave this city.”

  “I live and work here.”

  “Look, you’ve come here with a group of terrorists.”

  “I have no connection with any of them!”

  “That might be the case, but we’re planning on rounding them all up and tossing them out of the country. You were born here so we can’t do that to you. But I’ll sleep a lot easier just knowing that you aren’t around.”

  “I work for a major corporation.”

  “Tell you what,” Hoover said almost sympathetically. “I’ll give you two weeks, so you can turn in your notice today.”

  “I’ve been absolutely honest and direct with you and I don’t think this is fair.”

  “Mr. Moses, if I didn’t think you were honest and if you didn’t serve honorably in the military and attend Princeton, I guarantee I’d have you in jail serving at least three to five years.”

  “For what?”

  “For my peace of mind.”

  As Paul left the old building and tried to hail a cab back home, he thought maybe this was all for the best. He was getting sick of Washington and he missed New York. Upon arriving home, he promptly contacted Bush and delicately explained that it was time for him to head back to New York. He was giving his two weeks notice.

  “Paul, you’re throwing away a very promising, lucrative career here.”

  “It’s not a money issue.”

  “You want to do design work, I promise I can—”

  “It’s not that, it’s just that I’ve always wanted to work in the public sector in New York,” Paul said, trying to find a comfortable excuse.

  “Look, I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep, but we’ve donated a lot of money to the Harding campaign. I might be able to arrange a nice administrative appointment.”

  “I’ve decided I want my old job back,” Paul lied, and thanked Bush for all he had done.

  Paul had been using his spare time in Washington, as well as the data he had access to, working on a paper that examined New York City’s power system losses and transformer tap settings. The gist of the study was that the metropolis could acquire electricity more efficiently by installing hydroelectric generators along the St. Lawrence River. When he showed his plans to an old colleague who had become an executive at Con Edison in New York City, he was quickly offered a job as a property assessor.

  Meanwhile, Mayor Mitchel had abandoned young Robert Moses and his notorious Standardization Plan in an effort to regain some popularity. But it had made little difference, and in 1918 Mitchel lost his reelection bid to John Francis Hylan, “Red Mike.” Bella said she had never seen her youngest son so crestfallen as he had become since losing his job. In addition, Mr. Robert had been stigmatized in the press as a privileged rich kid, an enemy of the working man.

  Bella told Paul how his brother had been contacting everyone he knew and was going out on every job interview he could get. It was then, almost as if their fates were inversely related, that Paul got accepted into a prestigious new executive program at Con Edison—just the break he had been waiting for. He was now in line to move up the ranks and make some real policy decisions.

  Seeing these developments as an opportunity to bridge a gap that had widened between them over the years, Paul decided to pay an unannounced visit to his brother. Robert’s new wife Mary invited him in, but told him that her husband was out looking for work. Robert called him back that night and explained apologetically that it was a bad time for him to see people.

  It was kind of like the opposite of going to a dentist’s office: Uli found that if he concentrated hard on something painful, he could remain in the moment. He pinched himself and counted at least thirty small fires illuminating the wide underground encampment. A group of people were kneeling by a wall under what appeared to be a series of large, sealed sluice gates. Uli realized that this vast space had probably been some kind of dried-out, obsolete catch basin. It
appeared that water had once drained down into the sewer pipe he had just climbed out of. Clusters of groaning people huddled around the huge, flat cement bottom of this empty reservoir. The walls of it sloped upward at about a forty-five-degree angle. All appeared filthy, most of the men in rags and loincloths and sporting beards of varying lengths. Several had no clothes on whatsoever, which made Uli feel less self-conscious about his own nudity.

  “Are you sure you’re not Casey?” asked the middle-aged woman with short auburn hair.

  “No, I’m pretty sure I’m Uli … though I might be Paul.”

  “You didn’t see my son? We were together and—”

  “I didn’t see anything other than that damn net down there. It blocked my escape.”

  “No one can make it all the way down that pipe,” some long beard called out. “People were drowning.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That you can’t make it out?”

  “Some guy told me.”

  “Who?”

  “The black dude we elected leader. He was the one who set up the netting to try to rescue anyone who was flowing through.”

  “Where is he?” Uli asked, glancing around.

  “Who?”

  “The leader!” Uli snapped.

  “Oh, he vanished into the Mkultra years ago,” the bearded man replied, and then as if to emulate the leader, he too wandered off.

  13

  The large chamber looked to Uli like some kind of vast primordial internment center. He remembered the roundups and deportations in 1920, including all the suspected anarchists that Attorney General Palmer and his boy, J. Edgar Hoover, had tracked down. A ship full of suspects had pulled away from Manhattan, deporting all the Red troublemakers back to Russia.

  Just thinking of Hoover’s lumpy old face, Uli felt a mix of loyalty, friendship, and despair—he wasn’t sure if this was coming from himself or Paul. Uli vividly remembered him at the height of his power in the 1960s: Hoover, the stodgy authoritarian, shouting commandments down from high. He didn’t know why, but he could also envision the short pudgy man wearing a woman’s corset and garter belt, sitting on the edge of a bed. In another moment, as Paul’s memories came back into focus, he saw a different Hoover, slim and dapper, an ambitious young man who had secured his post in the Attorney General’s Office through his mother’s cousin. He could just as easily have served in the Department of Interior, like his father had, or worked in any other sector of government bureaucracy, like many of his other Washington relatives.

  That year, Bella invited all three kids home for Rosh Hashanah. As soon as Paul showed up, she told him how Robert had recently traveled all the way to Cleveland for a minor bureaucratic interview, only to get rejected again.

  When Robert and Mary arrived with their two baby girls, his sister and parents greeted them at the door. Emanuel shook hands with his youngest son and tried to utter some encouraging words, while Mary complained to Bella and Edna about how their apartment on the Upper West Side was getting too tight with the birth of their youngest daughter.

  “Well, you’ve just got to find a bigger place,” Bella said with a big smile.

  “Robert!” Paul called out, coming down the stairs. “It’s impossible to get ahold of you, brother.”

  As Paul approached his sibling, Robert replied, “You dumb son of a bitch, you’ve ruined my life!”

  “Robert!” their father snapped.

  “You can’t talk to Paul that way!” Edna added.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” Paul asked.

  “When Mayor Hylan took office, some little creep approached me and said that if I ever poked my big kike nose in City Hall again, he’d make sure the papers got wind of my Bolshevik brother.”

  “What?” Edna cried out. “Who said such a thing?”

  “Evans, a Tammany Hall boy who they hired to get rid of me because of my reforms. He got the information from some muckety muck in Washington. Why don’t you tell them yourself, Paul: What was the real reason you quit your big Washington job?”

  “What are you saying?” Bella asked.

  “I’m saying that your eldest son became best friends with every bomb-throwing Commie in North America.”

  “They weren’t my friends. I told the government everything I knew about them.”

  “It was that damn Mexican girl.”

  “Watch it!” Paul warned.

  “If you want to rub Mom’s face in crap all her life, that’s your prerogative—”

  “Robert, that’s an awful thing to say!” Bella interrupted.

  “—but I’m not as forgiving as she is!”

  “My relationship with Mom is none of your business,” Paul fired back.

  “You gave your boy an Ivy League education and in return he’s become an enemy of this country.”

  “Just stop it!” his mother gasped.

  “When are you going to get it?” Robert asked. “He hates us!”

  “Shut up, Robert, I’m not saying it again!”

  “She and Dad worked so hard to get you that interview at Kuhn & Loeb. Everyone knew about it.”

  “That’s enough, Robert,” Emanuel said.

  “You thoroughly embarrassed her,” Robert jabbed.

  “I appreciated what you did,” Paul said, turning to Bella.

  “I just didn’t want to be a banker, Mom!”

  “Instead, you became a goddamn lobbyist for an arms manufacturer,” Robert said.

  “Byrd & Hale owns a number of companies, one of which is munitions. They promised that if I did lobbying work, they’d reward me with an electrical engineering job,” Paul explained to Bella.

  “And you couldn’t even do that, could you? Your past caught up with you and you had to quit,” Robert continued. “Well, you ruined your career and now you’ve hurt mine too!”

  “Look, Robert, I’m truly sorry,” Paul said. “Yes, I knew some unsavory types down in Mexico, but I had no involvement with any of this stuff.”

  “I don’t reward people for screwing up my life. I punish them!”

  “I never meant to embarrass you.”

  “I think you should apologize to Paul,” Bella said.

  “I’ve spent my life carefully avoiding situations like this,” Robert added, “and when I find out that my family has to pay the price because my brother wants to get in the sack with some hot little tamale—”

  Paul slapped Robert, who nearly fell to the ground, remaining bent to one side for several seconds.

  “Oh God!” Mary screamed. Her little girls shrieked. Even Edna covered her mouth.

  “That’s enough!” Emanuel shouted, stepping forward between his two taller, broader sons. But he didn’t need to, neither brother was going any further. Uli knew that something irrevocable had just occurred between them.

  When Paul grabbed his coat, only Maria, standing in the foyer, tried to stop him. He hurried out of the old brownstone, slamming the door behind him.

  On his way home, Paul angrily assessed the full magnitude of his fight with Robert. For the first time, Paul had actually seemed to be in a superior position, and his brother must have decided that this calculated act would turn their mother’s opinion around. Robert wasn’t a failure, just a victim of his brother’s cavalier behavior. And Paul—who was finally doing well—was the clear cause of Robert’s recent bad luck.

  Further proof that this was a premeditated act, Paul noted, was the fact that he had repeatedly tried to meet with Robert in recent weeks to offer his support. Now it was clear that Robert had just been biding his time—all for this ambush. Some peon had probably revealed his meeting with that snot-nosed Hoover kid in Washington. Instead of approaching Paul and conveying his anger and frustration, Robert was using it as capital, exploiting this embarrassing development for all to see.

  By the next morning, though, Paul decided he was being unfair, even paranoid. There’s no way his younger brother could be this strategic o
r diabolical. He simply lacked the guile. Paul began to feel guilty for even thinking such a thing.

  Over the ensuing days, the more he thought about it, the worse he felt about what had happened with Robert. His brother was a young father of two, and just when he thought he had reached some station of security—a plum assignment from Mayor Mitchel—it was pulled away in the most humiliating fashion. All the rage and frustration of being dismissed by the boy mayor and then being snubbed by Hylan and Tammany Hall and so many others—Paul could hardly blame Robert for losing his temper.

  About a month later, Paul received a call from Bella with exciting news. Due to the blessed intervention of some politico’s wife, Robert had just had an encouraging meeting with the newly elected governor, Al Smith. Great things were on the horizon. A week later, she called Paul again to announce that Robert had been appointed Smith’s chief of staff. He was placed on a commission addressing the reorganization of the state government, something very much akin to what he had been feverishly trying to do for the City of New York.

  Paul decided to call Robert at home, hoping to congratulate him on the news. Mary picked up to say that Robert was still at the office. Paul told her that he was truly sorry for their spat, and that he wanted to apologize for his behavior.

  That weekend, when Robert still hadn’t called, Paul tried again. This time, Mary said that Robert had gotten his message but was too busy to call back. “He told me to say thanks. When things calm down, he’ll call you.”

  Paul asked for his brother’s work number, but Mary just giggled nervously and said that even she didn’t know it yet. It was clear that despite Robert’s reversal of fortune, he was not yet ready to forgive Paul.

  In mid-September, just as Paul was getting up the nerve to pay another unannounced visit to Robert at his New York City office, the unthinkable occurred: A horse-drawn wagon approached a lunchtime crowd at 23 Wall Street and detonated a hundred pounds of explosives along with five hundred pounds of cast-iron slugs, leaving scores maimed and dying. Thirty-eight people were killed and over four hundred were wounded. A note found nearby said, Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you!