It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  The court reporter didn’t know how to react. If she’d been a patient in the clinic, she sure wouldn’t have wanted her private business shown in a courtroom. And had it really been fair for the FBI to coerce her into recording people? But the nurse was truly sorry—shouldn’t Dr. Herschel at least accept Shazar’s apology?

  During Shazar’s testimony, Coulter showed videos that she had taken. “Yes, Dr. Herschel routinely performed abortions in her abattoir. And she helped illegal immigrants avoid federal agents.”

  The five male judges, the bailiff, the clerk, and the two armed marshals gasped in delighted indignation as a camera focused on a woman’s vulva, where the doctor was inserting a speculum. A nurse, back to the camera, was bathing the woman’s forehead with a towel. After a moment, blood flowed. The camera zoomed in on a blood clot, which Coulter identified as a dead baby.

  After letting Justice Sessions and the rest of the all-male court lick their lips for a long moment, Coulter showed a video of the alley behind the clinic. A dark van was backed up to the clinic’s rear door.

  “We can’t see who is coming out at this particular moment, but we do know that Dr. Herschel used this and other vehicles to whisk away illegals before ICE agents could demand their papers. Of course, once we spotted the ruse, we stopped the vans and arrested the occupants.”

  Here, the video showed stalwart Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopping several different vehicles. They pulled out women and children, cuffed them, and thrust them into government cars. Dr. Herschel’s lawyer directed a contemptuous smile at the prosecution table and made a point of writing an exceptionally long note. She whispered something to her own assistant, a young man whose impeccable tailoring matched her own. The young man bit back a guffaw, earning a frown from Justice Sessions.

  The final charge against the doctor claimed she’d helped spirit away the notorious immigration activist Sofia Pacheco. Since going onto the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, Pacheco had been hidden in churches and attics by sympathizers across the nation. Every time the government seemed poised to make an arrest, it turned out they had the wrong information, or, worse, someone at the FBI or ICE had leaked the raid and given Pacheco time to make her getaway.

  Finally, thirteen months ago, they were sure they had cornered Pacheco in a Chicago garden shop. The shop made a delivery of gladioli and daylilies to Dr. Herschel inside a long carton; Pacheco, apparently, lay underneath the flowers.

  At the clinic, someone, perhaps the doctor, perhaps one of her staff, styled Pacheco’s hair to resemble the doctor’s own, streaked it with white dye, put her in a lab coat, and brazenly sent her outside.

  “The agent detailed to follow the doctor had stepped away from his post for three minutes—even our ICE agents sometimes have a call from nature” (laughter from Sessions and the other four judges).

  “The clinic staff seemed to be watching our agent, because they used that window of time to send Pacheco out; she drove off in Dr. Herschel’s own Audi.”

  The Audi had been found in the meatpacking district; the doctor was in surgery all day and claimed to know nothing about Pacheco. “Of course she knew about Pacheco: why else did she leave her Audi at the clinic instead of driving herself to the hospital?”

  Ruth Lebeau cross-examined the agent to no avail: Wasn’t it true that Dr. Herschel often used a car service between the clinic and the hospital? Wasn’t it true that she was often in the operating room for ten or even fifteen hours, so that she was too fatigued to drive herself at the end of surgery?

  “You’re arguing generalities,” Justice Sessions rebuked Lebeau. “We’re looking at a specific day and a particular crime.”

  At the end of the eighth day, the prosecution rested. “The government has irrefutable evidence that warrants that Dr. Herschel be stripped of her U.S. citizenship. However, we believe her crimes rise to the level of deliberate treason against the United States by refusing to acknowledge the power of the government to pass the Keep America Free Act, and to enforce its provisions.”

  Coulter wiped his mouth with the red handkerchief he kept in his breast pocket for such moments and resumed his seat. Justice Sessions adjourned the court and said they would hear the defense in the morning. He and Melvin Coulter rode down the elevator together and were later seen yet again at the Potawatomi Club, laughing over their drinks—martini for the prosecutor, iced tea for the abstemious justice.

  • • •

  All during the final day of the prosecution’s case, Coulter had been smirking with his juniors at the prosecution table, watching as Ruth Lebeau sent her own juniors out in flocks.

  In the morning, it became clear that the defense was in trouble, and why: their key witnesses had disappeared. The detective V. I. Warshawski, who had gathered much of the defense’s evidence, was in prison herself: she’d been arrested two days earlier, charged under the same sections of the Keep America Free Act as Dr. Herschel.

  The court reporter thought Dr. Herschel was going to faint. Her dark, vivid face turned pale and waxy and she swayed in her seat. Ruth Lebeau, her attorney, asked if she needed a break.

  “I require water,” the doctor said.

  Ruth Lebeau’s chief assistant produced a large thermos of hot water from his case and poured a cup for the doctor. Since the rest of her witnesses had been disappeared, Lebeau called the doctor to the stand.

  As the doctor spoke, her vocal cords gradually regained their flexibility. The court reporter had strained to understand her at first, but after half an hour, the grating harshness left the doctor’s voice. She spoke clearly, almost musically: the reporter realized it was a pleasure to listen to her after all the men she’d been recording during the prosecution phase. Too much bullying and swagger, none of this evenness, this effort to be clear that the doctor exhibited.

  “I treat everyone who comes to my clinic,” Dr. Herschel said. “I don’t need to see a driver’s license or a passport to diagnose measles or an ectopic pregnancy.”

  On cross-examination, Coulter demanded to know why she’d refused to treat the pregnant woman who’d been brought to her jail cell.

  “I am curious about your knowledge of this woman,” the doctor said. “Did you direct the guards to bring her to my cell?”

  The members of the tribunal seemed to gasp, but Justice Sessions said, “You are on the stand, doctor. You don’t get to ask questions.”

  The doctor bowed her head.

  “You must answer the attorney,” Sessions said.

  “The woman was not pregnant,” Dr. Herschel said.

  “You refused to examine her, so how can you possibly know this?” Coulter asked.

  “How many pregnant women have you examined in your legal career, Mr. Coulter?” the doctor said. “Oh, yes, I must not ask you questions. But we will assume it is one woman, your wife, who produced two children with you. I have seen thousands. I know the difference between an abdomen with a fetus inside it, and a body with a pillow buckled to it. Perhaps you would have been fooled, but I was not.”

  “You can’t know that!” Coulter snapped.

  The doctor shrugged but remained silent.

  “Have you nothing to say?” Sessions demanded.

  Before Lebeau could jump to her feet to remind the court that Coulter had made a statement, not asked a question, the doctor said, “I have lived a long life. I have seen governments taken over by ravening weasels, I have watched them incite a bored or ignorant or fearful mob to violence. That you would bribe or coerce a woman to pretend a pregnancy does not surprise me, but it does sicken me.”

  Coulter sat down again. There was a moment of silence and then Ruth Lebeau asked the prosecution to put up one of their videos of a couple of women being pulled from an SUV in handcuffs. She zoomed in on their faces and asked the doctor if she recognized them.

  “Yes, they were patients, first in my clinic, and then, because the daughter had complications, I saw her in surgery at Beth Israel.”

  “And ca
n you identify them, by name, I mean?” Lebeau asked.

  “I can, but I will not. It is enough that these strange men can look at them and know they sought medical help, but I will not violate their privacy further by naming them.”

  “Did you know that the older woman was Justice Sessions’s housekeeper?” Lebeau asked.

  The doctor’s eyes widened: the court reporter, barely keeping back a gasp herself, thought the doctor hadn’t known. “I did not know that, but I do not discriminate among those I treat.”

  “And did you know the daughter, whose abortion you performed, had been raped by the justice?”

  At that, Sessions slammed his gavel and demanded an end to the proceedings. “The defense will rest. They cannot call independent witnesses to this calumny—”

  “Yes, we cannot call your housekeeper, who looked after you for twenty-three years, because she was deported last week, was she not?” Lebeau said.

  “That was a decision by Immigration and Customs, not by me. The court is adjourned for today. The tribunal will meet tomorrow to discuss a verdict.”

  • • •

  The court reporter couldn’t sleep that night. She was shocked by today’s testimony. Abortion was evil, and the doctor was wicked to perform them. But Justice Sessions—when the black lady lawyer said he’d raped his housekeeper’s daughter, he’d ended the trial. If he’d been innocent, surely he would have denied the accusation.

  The court reporter had a high security clearance, which required her to sign papers promising never to speak to anyone of the proceedings she attended. She thought of her oath, she thought of the doctor, the presiding justice, the men licking their lips at the video of the naked woman’s vagina.

  At five in the morning, she got up and went down the street to her local drugstore. The clerk was yawning, barely awake, counting the seconds until her overnight shift would end. The reporter, her hands shaking, paid cash for a cheap phone. She made a call to the cousin who had helped get her the job with the federal courts.

  • • •

  In the morning, the tribunal met for less than an hour before summoning the prisoner. The court reporter could see that the doctor had probably not slept any more than she had herself. The doctor’s walnut-colored skin was pale, her eyes a pair of black holes sunk deep in her face.

  Justice Sessions said, “The court has voted four to one to find you guilty on all counts under the Keep America Free Act. We debated stripping you of your citizenship and deporting you, but we are well aware that your native country, Austria, is prepared to make you an international heroine and martyr, and so we are sentencing you to natural life in a federal prison in the United States. The Federal Bureau of Prisons will inform your attorney when they have decided where to house you. For now, you will remain in Chicago in the care of the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Court is adjourned.”

  A marshal seized Dr. Herschel and marched her through the side door that led to the fenced-in yard at the back of the building where prisoners were transferred into the buses that returned them to the various jails around town.

  Her lawyer and the lawyer’s chief assistant walked with the doctor as far as the exit: they weren’t permitted beyond the doorway. As she tried to thank the lawyer, the doctor seemed to stumble. The assistant attorney caught her as she fainted.

  He pulled his thermos from his briefcase and unscrewed the top. No one could agree what happened next, but one of the marshals thought the young lawyer poured a glass bottle labeled “sugar” into the thermos. Smoke billowed out. It covered the doctor, the lawyer, and the marshal, and spread through the fenced-in courtyard. The marshals pulled their weapons and began firing into the thick fog, but someone screamed: they’d hit the driver of the prison van, who’d been standing behind it waiting to lock the doctor inside. By the time the fog cleared, the prison van was gone.

  The van was discovered at Belmont Harbor on the Chicago shore of Lake Michigan. The Coast Guard began a search of all boats on the lake, but they didn’t find the doctor, the lawyer’s chief assistant, or the federal marshal who’d handcuffed the doctor as she was taken from the courtroom. No one noticed that the court reporter had also disappeared.

  Months went by; the Department of Justice kept close surveillance on anyone who might be in touch with the doctor, even the imprisoned V. I. Warshawski, who’d been the doctor’s close friend for decades. They monitored the doctor’s family members in Canada, her medical colleagues, even some of her high-profile patients. No one spoke of her. No one heard from her.

  Time passed. Crops were rotting in the fields because the immigrants who used to harvest them were denied entry or had been deported from a safe America. Construction sites languished. The 117th Congress overturned the most stringent sections of the Keep America Free Act, although the criminal penalties for performing abortions on U.S.-born women remained in place.

  Somewhere along the way, V. I. Warshawski was released from prison. She, too, disappeared without a trace, despite the FBI’s continued monitoring of her actions.

  Every now and then, the FBI or ICE would follow up on a report of a small, black-eyed doctor performing miracle cures among indigenous Americans, or in Congo or Central America. She had a few assistants, who helped trace rapists or murderers or thieves in whatever village or jungle they found themselves, but by the time U.S. agents were dispatched across the deserts and mountains, these legendary figures had moved on.

  SARA PARETSKY’s husband describes her as a pit dog, willing to go against anyone as long as they are at least four times her size. This means she’s often exhausted, as is her iconic fictional detective, V. I. Warshawski, star of eighteen of Paretsky’s twenty novels. The granddaughter of undocumented immigrants who escaped certain death by seeking refuge in America, Paretsky believes our country thrives on immigrants and diversity. She has worked for women’s reproductive rights since 1970, and clings to a romantic notion that the Framers were serious when they said the Constitution exists to “establish justice and promote the general welfare.” The recipient of many awards, she is one of four living writers to hold both the Cartier Diamond Dagger and the Edgar Grand Master.

  TOM PIAZZA

  * * *

  Bystanders (April 2003)

  A Wednesday evening, the air cool and diaphanous. Everyone in Greenwich Village seemed to have taken to the sidewalks. Dave Soloff and Rachel Tobias made their way down West Fourth Street toward their gallery rendezvous with Rachel’s parents, who were grudgingly making the trip from the Upper West Side at Rachel’s insistence.

  She had seen the listing in the New Yorker and had read the notice aloud to Dave four nights earlier in his Hudson Street sublet as they ate Chinese takeout from the restaurant they had nicknamed Hunan Resources.

  “ ‘These starkly juxtaposed photographic images of human rights violations, assembled and mounted by Jacobi in a muted, claustral, winding passage, cut across all ideological and geographical borders, from WTC to Palestine, and together make up a kind of Family of Man of suffering. Warning: the images are extremely disturbing, and not for the delicate.’ It’s all photographs by different photographers, amateur and professional. It was put together by somebody named Lilith Jacobi. Have you heard of her?”

  “Nope,” Dave said. “Great name, though. Is it going to tell us anything we don’t already know?”

  “We should bring Abe,” she said.

  Rachel and her father, Abe Tobias—legendary book publisher, World War II veteran, and staunch Israel supporter—had been conducting an escalating, monthlong guerrilla war of words over the Iraq invasion. In the two years since Dave and Rachel had graduated from Hollister College, Dave had sat through enough dinner-table battles in the labyrinthine apartment where Rachel lived with her parents to recognize a disaster in the making. Rachel called the building the Angstschloss—the Castle of Anxiety. It certainly was that for Dave, whose part-time job at a down-market travel magazine was a ready target for Abe between skirmishes with hi
s headstrong daughter.

  “Come on,” Dave said. “You’d kill each other.”

  “Abe is exactly who needs to see this,” she said.

  Dave dropped it in hopes that she might forget the idea. But she didn’t, and that next Wednesday found them walking through the Village streets on their way to the gallery.

  Since the 9/11 attacks nineteen months earlier, the lift of possibility that New York offered on a spring evening, the intimation that any turn of a corner could open a new chapter, was not quite enough to drown out the lingering sense that something loud was about to happen overhead. When Rachel was very young, the city was still dangerous in an old-fashioned way; there were pockets of unreconstructed poverty and crime, homeless people sleeping on sidewalk grates, and lunatics roving the streets and the subways. Still, in those young days one could prepare oneself with knowledge and lore to minimize the possibility of trouble. That was now officially a thing of the past. An airplane could plow into a building right above your head. But on an evening like this, despite the ambient anxiety, the reflexive hunch of the psychic shoulders against the coming blow, the Village exhaled poetry along its tree-lined streets and behind its charming brick façades, and you could almost forget about a lot of things.

  “Jesus,” Rachel said as they walked down West Fourth Street. “I want to live down here. The Upper West Side is so . . . literal.”

  “Literal?” Dave said.

  “It’s like . . . ‘You want living space? Here’s a big cube divided into little cubes, on rectangular blocks . . .’ There are no twists and turns. Like, you’d never have Chumley’s on the Upper West Side.”

  “Well . . . ,” Dave said, “you’ve got Zabar’s.”

  “You’ve got the White Horse,” Rachel said.

  “You’ve got the Museum of Natural History.”

  “No fair.”