“Your presence at the trial is important,” the district attorney told me. His salt-and-pepper hair and wire-rimmed glasses gave him a formidable look, and I was glad I wouldn’t have to answer his questions on the witness stand. “You should be in the courtroom as a show of support for your husband and for the NYPD.”
He told me the Busics had support from the Croatian community, groups who raised money for their defense. “They’ve been deluged with mail and gifts from sympathizers who congratulate them for their bravery and sacrifice.”
It galled me that there were people who sanctioned blowing up a cop, who thought of the bombing as an accident, a small sacrifice to pay for their cause. It wasn’t the fault of the Croatian Freedom Fighters that the bomb went off, they reasoned, the bomb on the plane was fake, so the judge would be lenient. There were so many worse criminals in the city, the PLO, the FALN.
“Will they get out on bail?” The thought paralyzed me.
“No. They’re being charged with hijacking which resulted in the death of a police officer.” I squeezed my hand to control the shaking, and the sharp edge of the engagement ring I refused to take off dug into my skin. “That will keep them in prison for many years. Now,” Trager took out a legal pad, “tell me about your husband.”
I wanted to tell him about Brian’s eyes—magnetic blue ringed with dark lashes—about the kindness he showed people I crossed the street to avoid, that he hated beans, and thought tardiness a lack of respect. I wanted to tell him what a great father he was. How he fixed the boys’ breakfast and lunch while I commuted to Manhattan, and pushed metal trucks over the floor and made up endless stories to hear them laugh. I had stored up perfect memories, one after another, which was how I imagined loved ones remembered the dead, sharp edges smoothed, complexities ironed out.
But the DA couldn’t talk about perfect memories in a courtroom, so instead I told him about Brian Murray who served in Vietnam, the bomb expert, trained to dismantle explosives by the United States Air Force, the FBI, and the New York City Police Department, a man who could detangle a potentially fatal scrabble of wires without breaking a sweat. A man with steady hands and faith in God, who had simply followed orders when he stepped into the pit at Rodman’s Neck.
Trager wrote on his pad without looking up, my words just information he would add to his trial notes. Then he put down his pen and looked at me.
“I know this is difficult for you, Mrs. Murray, but I want you to know that I’ll do everything in my power to bring the people responsible for your husband’s death to justice.”
“Will they get the death penalty?” I asked.
Trager told me the death penalty wasn’t mandatory in all hijacking cases. After carefully considering the law that mandated the death penalty, he did not believe this case would apply, as the evidence could not establish depraved indifference, the intent to kill.
“The maximum sentence is twenty-five to life.” And that meant that Busic would be eligible for parole in ten years, and Julie in eight. “It will be up to the judge’s discretion.” Then he stood, signaling the end of our meeting.
__________
The city was dressed for Christmas, with fake-bearded Santas ringing Salvation Army bells, wreaths strung up on lampposts, dazzling store windows, and even the air felt like Christmas. I took the subway to midtown, stepped into FAO Schwarz on a whim, and bought the Christmas display with a cowboy and Native American village. The price tag was more than I had ever spent on the boys for anything, but I wanted it for them, for me.
I remembered Brian telling me how, when he was a little boy, his living room would be filled with gifts for the five kids: bicycles, dolls, rocking horses, games, clothing, anything a child could wish for. His face had been a mixture of emotions when he told me how they would rip into the endless piles of presents.
“But it was only temporary. As soon as my father left for work the next day, the room would be cleared out, the bicycles gone, the dolls and toys vanished. ‘Christmas is over,’ my mother would tell us.”
As a boy, he dreamed about the presents that disappeared in the same way our sons now dreamed about their father, only to wake up to our new normal, a life without Daddy.
When I got home that night, the house smelled of the wood-burning fireplace, and my mother was settled on the couch with a cup of tea and a romance novel. The lights on the Christmas tree gave a festive air to the house, but all I could think about was Christmas without Brian by my side to watch the surprise on Keith’s face when he saw the fire engine he asked Santa for. My head pulsed with pain as I remembered the DA’s words. Ten years. I couldn’t picture my life in ten years. I couldn’t even picture it in one.
My mother had called Timmy to put up the tree. When we were little, Timmy and I dragged a tree from Southern Boulevard to Faile Street every Christmas. The old guy we called Pumpkin Head finally gave us one nobody would pay for. No teeth and a caved-in face with a cigarette stuck in his mouth, Pumpkin Head would tell us again and again to come back later, but we stood around until he got tired of telling us to get lost. “Here ya go,” he would snarl through cigarette smoke, and shove the skinny tree at us. “Don’t come back next year.”
This year, with his new wife Jean, Timmy had come all the way from the Bronx with the tree tied to the roof of his Chevy Nova, and I felt grateful to him for making the house look alive.
In the kitchen, the yapping of our new puppy, Morty, increased the pain in my head. “Pipe down,” I pleaded with the cocker spaniel. Morty Moot Mope, after the rhyming puppet from Sesame Street, had been a concession on my part, and since we brought him home there had not been a peaceful moment. The grief books told me not to do anything drastic in the months just after a death, but I stopped working, bought a puppy, invited my mother to move in with us, sold the house in Rockville Centre, and moved to Northport in the span of a few months.
When I thought back to the day we moved to Northport, my loss felt compounded. My mother and Gracie packed Brian’s clothes. “Give them to someone who can use them,” I told my mother, and looked away when Danny walked past with Brian’s jackets and slacks still on hangers. Then I had taken a last look at the den where the couch we made love on was still outlined in dust. Timmy, Danny, and Patrick had already lifted furniture from the rooms that held the weight of our life together.
“Goodbye,” I whispered as I closed the door behind me.
Our new Northport neighborhood smelled of hickory smoke and falling leaves, and the house seemed to be waiting for two little boys to bring laughter to its empty rooms. But Keith had sobbed.
“I can’t find Daddy here.” He ran to the window and watched my brothers pull away in the moving truck. “How will he find us?”
Now Keith and Chris were sitting at the kitchen table, leafing through a stack of comics Timmy brought with the tree, eating the SpaghettiOs my mother made for them.
“Hi Mom,” Keith said. His face had lost that open, happy smile, and I thought again of the Busics in a holding cell, just a train ride away.
That night, Gracie melted wax for homemade candles as the boys sat mesmerized. I didn’t have the heart to say what I thought, that the wax made a big mess, that the candles would burn down in minutes, that the kitchen smelled like burnt rope. Instead, I showed them the early Christmas present and the four of us got down on the living room rug and set up the village.
At bedtime, Keith snuggled under the comforter, a shock of red hair the only sign he was in the bed; Chris curled up in his footy pajamas in a big-boy bed to avoid any more stunts he devised trying to climb out of his crib. I kissed them both, my lips lingering on their soft skin. I stood at their window for a few moments, listening to their little boy sounds and thinking about the Christmas before when Brian had worked a four-to-twelve and I waited for him to share a glass of the eggnog I made for the family dinner the next day. It was two in the morning when we fin
ally finished wrapping presents, and I watched as he folded the triangle of Santa paper just so, trying not to let his big bomb-squad thumbs get in the way. The stereo was playing Christmas carols on low, and we had fallen asleep, my head on his chest, all the Christmas presents around us, one of the cookies Chris left out for Santa still in Brian’s hand.
Now, a wet snow fell and disappeared as soon as it hit the ground. Next door, a rectangle of light hit the stone walk. A minute later my neighbors appeared. The wife was carrying a red Christmas package and wearing a fur coat. I could hear laughter through the cold pane of glass, and then her husband picked her up and carried her down the path to their car, like a bride.
I thought about our visit to see Santa a few days before. When Santa asked what they would like, Keith asked for a fire truck. Chris said, “I want my Daddy back.” Watching the slick snowfall and listening to my boys’ breathing, a shiver ran through me. Soon I would be face-to-face with Zvonko Busic, the man who haunted my dreams, and Julie Busic, the mysterious woman who I thought about more than I would like to admit.
Over time, from library research and the files Charlie brought to me, I learned she had been born Julienne Schultz in the quaint little town of Gearhart, Oregon. Her father was a professor of classical Greek, her mother a librarian. She was the oldest of four, the only girl, most doted upon.
I not only envied Julie’s childhood and the opportunities she had, I thirsted for them. I could almost taste her life, breathe the fresh Oregon air. As a girl, I would have gladly traded places with her, lived in the room I imagined she had all to herself—filled with books and school trivia—had parents who read my homework and prepared for my future.
How could anyone in her right mind decide that wasn’t good enough? How could anyone throw it all away on a country that was so far away that most Americans couldn’t even locate it on a map? I thought about what Gracie would have done with the life Julie had been given and was sure she would have followed her dream to become an airline hostess, and not become a junkie who would never rise above the memory of that first hit of nirvana. I was sure I would have made more of my own life too.
Something must have gone wrong in Julie’s young life. Perhaps it was three brothers who usurped her position as an only child, but that didn’t seem a clear reason for this upper-middle class American girl to disparage and disown her country. Perhaps she sought a more adventurous place than Gearhart, a more significant life in a foreign country. Still, that didn’t explain her eerie trip down a terrorist’s rabbit hole. The juxtaposition of what she had been brought up with and what she had done filled me with rage and envy.
__________
Downstairs, Gracie’s laughter brought me into the living room where she was cleaning up the cowboy village. A row of tampons in their plastic cases were lined up in front of a teepee.
“What the heck?” I looked to Gracie, who laughed again.
“Keith said they were cannons.”
I laughed along with my sister, thinking my son very clever.
Out the back door, I watched my mother standing on the deck in her coat, a cigarette in her hand, her once-shiny red hair cropped short and combed with her fingers instead of a brush. She had given up her apartment in the Bronx to move to Northport. The country, she called it, where she couldn’t call her friends to have a few beers after work and where she had to put on a coat to smoke a cigarette.
She came inside smelling of cigarettes and picked up a dishtowel to dry the dinner dishes. I tried to think of her as a young girl, kicking up her heels at the Irish step-dance lessons she told me she took with her sisters, but saw instead that vein running down her leg, like a twisted river that cuts a map.
“Leave the dishes, Mom. I’ll do them.”
She folded the dishtowel over the oven handle. She didn’t want me to attend the trial, but asked Gracie to help her while I was gone. When she walked over to hug me, she whispered, “I love you, sweetheart.”
I was twenty-eight years old and thought I had long ago given up the need to hear those words, but as soon as they were spoken I hugged her tight. “I love you too.”
She stepped back and pushed her glasses up so she could see me better. Sweetheart? The word stayed in the room.
“Good night, Mom.”
I gave her smooth cheek a kiss. She held on to the bannister as she walked up the stairs and looked back at me, the child who would now take care of her.
Gracie and I stayed up late into the night, a beer for her, a glass of chardonnay for me. “Trager said the trial could take weeks.” I watched her take a sip of beer. “And I have to be there every day.” I told her about the Busic supporters, the gifts, the idea that they were heroes to their countrymen.
She nodded when I told her about the likelihood that Julie would spend no more than eight years in prison. She grew pensive and stared at something I couldn’t see. She had listened to the stories I read to her about Julie without saying much, and in some strange way, I thought she identified with Julie. Not the crime Julie committed, but the daring defiance of Julie’s actions was something Gracie understood.
She put down her beer and looked at me with those pretty blue eyes. Finally, she nodded. “Well, promise me this, you’ll do something nice for yourself when this trial is over.” She said it with a ferocity I hardly recognized. “Go to college like you always wanted. Make a new life for you and the boys.”
And just like when we were little girls, the world lit up with her words, her steady belief that little Kathy could be anything she chose.
“I’ll study writing,” I said with surety. With the addition of Social Security and my mother’s help, I realized I might be able to make college work. It had always been a dream, and now I could take a few classes when the boys were in school. “I’ll write a story about you,” I told her, remembering the promise I made long ago.
Gracie laughed. “You’ll have more than me to write about,” she assured me.
After a while, we moved around the house and turned off the lights. But we left the Christmas tree glittering in the night.
The price of anything is the amount
of life you exchange for it.
— William Faulkner
The Trial
Brian had been gone five months when DA Trager called and told me the trial would begin. I sat in the back of the courtroom, the only one to support Brian. Gracie had taken some vacation time to spend with her newest boyfriend Billy, and my mother was with the boys. I had thought of calling Charlie to join me, but lately he avoided my calls. He didn’t want to talk about the question I couldn’t stop asking: with a bomb squad so qualified and experienced, why had the bomb exploded? I had to find out what happened, as not knowing felt like I was suffocating. Perhaps I would learn something from the trial.
From the back of the courtroom, I watched as dozens of Croatian supporters crowded the benches. They were there to support their champions, who had forfeited their freedom for the liberation of their country. Then I saw them, the Busics, sitting as close as lovebirds. Although I expected to see them, it hit me hard, and I felt a tremor inside that left me weak. Zvonko Busic, mangy and dressed in black, looked like what he looked like in all the pictures I had seen of him so far: a terrorist.
But Julie, his wife, had lace on the cuffs of her white blouse and a perfect mantle of blonde hair falling across the middle of her back. Just as I was studying her, she turned in her seat and looked back, her eyes finding mine. There was an imperceptible change in her face. Did she know me? I sat straighter on the hard bench, my bra strap digging into my shoulder, and I remembered Paul’s words, Unsuitable for viewing. Suddenly I was glad the DA insisted I come. I wanted Julie to see me. I wanted to haunt her dreams, to plague her thoughts as the bomb tearing into Brian had mine.
I listened as the testimony droned on for hours. The FBI, the CIA, and the NYPD testified to the hijacking. T
he defense presented their case to the jury. I heard witness after witness praise the Busics’ bravery, the sacrifice they made to call attention to the atrocities of a country that wasn’t even Julie’s.
I read that sympathizers called Julie a heroine, a saint, and a symbol, wrote poems in her honor and raised money for her defense. Things just went wrong, they said. It was unfortunate that the safe bomb wasn’t safe after all. The officer’s death was collateral damage.
Every afternoon the press filled the courthouse stairs, creating a gauntlet as I tried to make my way to my car.
“Do you plan to be in the courtroom when Busic is sentenced?” Chuck Scarborough, New York’s most recognized anchor asked me.
“I’ll be there when the judge takes away his freedom and will ask to be kept informed of his whereabouts,” I said. “I want to know where he is for the rest of his miserable life.”
“Busic claims it wasn’t his fault the bomb exploded,” another reporter asked. “Do you think he should be held accountable?”
“Busic made the bomb,” I told him. “He packed eight sticks of dynamite into a pressure cooker and left it in a public area. You cannot design a bomb not to explode. By its very nature, dynamite is unstable, and there is always a chance of explosion with something so precarious.” Flashbulbs went off everywhere. Two-dozen microphones were held in front of my face. “He is responsible. He should be made to pay for my husband’s death with life in prison.”
At night, after I put the boys to bed, I sat at the dining room table with our new puppy sleeping beside me and read the newspapers. Sources reported that Busic believed they would be tried in European courts, where the system was more lenient. He was surprised when they were extradited to New York where they would face harsher sentences, but the press was not at all sure harsher sentences were coming, given the overwhelming support they were enjoying.
__________
The day McTigue testified about the explosion, his presence hung like a pall over the courtroom, his fragmented face a reflection of what Brian might have looked like, had he survived. On the witness stand he droned on in terms so technical, I could barely follow.
Life Detonated Page 11