Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  “What does that mean?” the older man asked, seemingly annoyed. “Do these boys have to say they are Jewish, or that they lived in Israel, or that they are American citizens? I’ll have them dance the hora in court if you think it would help.”

  “No. They are going to have to say, under oath, that they escaped from the ships in the harbor. And then they’ll face the consequences.” Shapiro spoke bluntly, testing to see how serious they were about this lawsuit. “As an officer of the court, I’m not supposed to advise you to break the law, but you do realize, don’t you, that now that you are off the ships, you could disappear into this country, even without legit ID cards.”

  “The organization I represent went to considerable effort to surreptitiously remove these men,” the older man said. He pointed at the three young men, who remained silent and seated. “These men are soldiers. Their families were murdered. They came here for sanctuary. They should live with dignity, not hide in the shadows like common criminals. They deserve to be treated with dignity. I want them here legally.”

  Shapiro thought a moment. All that the old man said was true, but the case was a loser. No judge would grant asylum in direct defiance of Congress and public opinion. But perhaps the case would garner sympathy and rattle America’s anti-immigrant hysteria.

  “This kind of lawsuit can be awfully expensive,” Shapiro said, speaking only to the older man. “We’ll need high-powered experts. They won’t come cheap. Even with them, chances are we’ll lose at the trial level and have to work our way through the appeals courts. You’re probably looking at $400,000 in legal fees and another $40,000 at least, in expenses.”

  “It’s not the money that matters,” the older man said. “An important principle is at stake here.”

  “The money matters if you don’t have it.”

  “Rest assured, counselor, we have it. How much of a retainer do you want?”

  “Just to clear up one point. Will you all be parties to the case?” He locked eyes with the older man.

  “These men are your clients. I am their, shall we say, benefactor.”

  Alone in the conference room after the men left, Shapiro took a deep breath and sat looking out the window at Boston Harbor. He pictured the thousands of frightened people on the two ships.

  I guess I took the case, he thought. I don’t expect we’ll win. I wonder what else will have to be done to save these people.

  CHAPTER 5

  Hinckley Bermuda 40 yawl is the ultimate New England acruising sailboat—the kind of boat that turns heads, the kind pampered by its rich owners. A blue water boat built with a tile fireplace as standard equipment, the Bermuda 40 Swift looked as incongruous tied up stern-first among the fishing boats in the tiny harbor on Xanthos as would a camel in the Alps. The rocky Greek island off the west coast of the Peloponnesus between Greece and Italy saw few yachts, and fewer built by dour Maine boatbuilders as family heirlooms for wealthy Yankees.

  Lt. Chaim Levi, former first officer on an Israeli Navy coastal patrol boat, could have cried when he saw the Hinckley’s long, blue hull, the roller furling jib and the stowaway main and mizzen sails, designed so the boat could be sailed singlehanded in the roughest of weather. The boat had been unattended for weeks.

  With this boat I could sail anywhere in the world, he thought. With this boat, I could go to America.

  Levi’s Israeli Navy patrol boat had spent three days escorting freighters and fishing boats, yachts and ferry boats, anything that could float and could carry people from Haifa Harbor westward into the Mediterranean, getting them away from the coast and the hastily armed fishing boats manned by Palestinians who’d spent three generations trying to force Jews from Israel but were now doing their best to keep any from escaping what they saw as Allah’s punishment.

  Finally, out of torpedoes and ammunition for the twin 50-caliber machine guns, with his captain dead from a knife wound to the chest when the boat was boarded at night, Levi knew the remaining fuel was down to a few hours. When his sole crewman spotted a wooden boat powered by two huge outboard engines and crammed with gun-waving men, Levi knew this would be the last engagement for his tired vessel. The Israeli fishing boat he was escorting was loaded with elderly people and children, one of the last boats to escape from Haifa before Lebanese soldiers, Israel’s former Christian allies, roared through the streets looting shops and raping women.

  Levi stationed his patrol boat between the Palestinians and the crowded fishing boat. He and his crewman had their handguns and nothing more. Engines full forward, he drove his vessel straight at the bow of the Palestinian boat, playing chicken with the armed men the way he used to race his little outboard head-on at friends when he was growing up in the small coastal resort town where his father managed a hotel for American tourists and Levi gave sailing lessons.

  This time, as he had so many times with friends, Levi swore he would not swerve. The two boats rammed into one another, the steel bow of the patrol boat driving through the wooden hull. Locked together, the two boats sank.

  Levi threw the inflatable life raft off his vessel’s stern seconds before the boats collided. The raft inflated automatically when it hit the water. Levi splashed in behind it, climbed into the raft and paddled desperately with both hands away from the glossy film on the water. As he feared, the fuel ignited, sending yellow flames and black smoke into the blue sky, roasting the men thrown by the collision into the water.

  Fortunately for Levi, a stiff breeze from the southeast drove his rubber raft out into the Mediterranean, away from what would, in other circumstances, have been the safety of the Israeli shore. Two days later he was picked up by a Greek fishing boat. The captain, no friend of Turks or Arabs, spent an evening in his cabin with Levi and two bottles of ouzo. He left Levi on the stone pier when the boat returned to Xanthos a week later, taking Levi’s worthless shekels in exchange for euros, both of them knowing the exchange was a gift, not a business deal.

  The captain’s parting present to Chaim Levi, one Levi never learned about, was the bottle of ouzo the captain left with his cousin, the corporal of the port police, Greece’s equivalent of the coast guard, with a request that Levi be left alone. This was a man who’d suffered enough, and Greeks could sympathize with suffering, the captain told his cousin. The corporal nodded and carried the ouzo into his tiny office on the stone quay. He passed the word among the fisherman that Levi was approved, and Levi found work cleaning fish and helping to mend nets. He slept on an old fishing boat too leaky to take to sea, run aground at the edge of the harbor.

  Chaim Levi introduced himself to the corporal, pronouncing the CH in his name with the full Hebrew guttural sound, as if he were clearing his throat before getting to the rest of his name. That pronunciation was beyond the Greek’s abilities. Levi was known among the fisherman as “the Jew.”

  Levi’s eyes were on the Hinckley, standing empty at the pier. “That is a fine boat,” he mentioned casually to the port police corporal as the two walked the fifty-meter length of stone pier that made up the town’s waterfront. “Maybe it is owned by a wealthy fisherman.”

  “A wealthy fisherman? There is no such thing,” the corporal laughed. “There are poor fishermen and there are old fishermen and there are tired fishermen and there are dead fishermen, but there are no wealthy fishermen. That fine boat is owned by an American whose wife had the misfortune to step on a bed of sea urchins. I myself offered to piss on her feet to soften the spines. I told him to soak her feet in lemon juice so the spines would not cause infection. He tried to pull them out himself, though, and of course they broke off in her feet, dozens of them.”

  Levi nodded as an idea formed in his mind.

  “He spent an hour on the telephone at the post office and they flew away in an airplane that landed right in the harbor on the water, the first time such an airplane has landed here,” the corporal said. “The great tragedy of it all is that he only paid his docking fee for two nights. He owes me twenty-five euros for each night fo
r the past two weeks. That is a serious amount of money.”

  “Maybe somebody should move the boat from the dock and anchor it. That would give more space at the dock for the working boats,” Levi said.

  The corporal nodded and held both hands in the air, palms upward.

  “Who in this village knows about American boats, how to raise the sails or start the engine?” the corporal groused.

  “I’ve sailed such boats when the Americans visited my country,” Levi said. “I’d be pleased to help you after all the kindness you’ve shown me. I’ll do it this afternoon. Where should I move the boat? It must be someplace safe, someplace sheltered from the winds to ride unattended at anchor.”

  The corporal told Levi about a cove a few kilometers down the coast. Nobody lived there. Steep rock walls protected it from the prevailing east winds.

  Levi topped up the water tanks in the sailboat’s bilge and pondered whether he should fill its diesel tanks, too.

  That would be too risky, he decided. How would I explain that?

  During the next week he spent his mornings riding a borrowed bicycle over the hills to nearby villages, where he bought all the canned goods he could afford and stashed them on the shore of the cove. Every afternoon, he rowed to the cove in one of the fishermen’s skiffs on the excuse that he wanted to make sure the boat was doing well unattended. He took fishing gear with him, telling people the small cove was the best fishing spot he’d found. Instead of fishing, though, he ferried supplies to the Hinckley.

  His body ached after six days of bicycling over the hills in the morning and rowing down the shore in the afternoons, but the boat was crammed with an unappetizing collection of canned goods.

  “I am sure the American will pay you well for all the care you have taken of his boat,” the corporal told Levi a week after the boat was removed from the pier. “I received a telegram from him saying he will return in two days.”

  “Two days?” Levi asked. “When was the telegram sent?”

  “It was sent yesterday and sat in the post office all day. The lazy postmaster was too involved in gossip to even send a boy to let me know it had come,” the corporal replied angrily. “I should get more respect. What if it had been something important? An important message should not sit overnight in a village post office, not with me a short walk away.”

  The corporal calmed down as a thought crossed his mind.

  “Perhaps, though, we should return the boat before the American arrives. He does not need to be worried about what might have happened to his boat since nothing did happen to it. Do you think he should have to worry about such a nothing?”

  “I agree with you, my friend,” Levi said. “There is no need to worry the American about a problem that never happened.”

  As Levi and the corporal walked to the rowing boat, Levi looked at the trees blowing in the strong east wind and calculated how far he could sail before the American arrived.

  “I think I’ll spend tonight on that boat. I’ve grown fond of it and I want everything cleaned and polished when the American comes.”

  “That should get you a nice tip,” the corporal said.

  “Goodbye, my friend,” Levi said, taking the corporal’s large hand in both of his. “You were a friend when I needed one. In this world at this time, a Jew appreciates kindness.”

  “What do you mean, goodbye?” The corporal eyed Levi strangely. “Do you expect the American to give you enough money to leave this island? Where would you go? A Jew will not have many friends right now. Stay here where you are welcome.”

  “Oh, the American will be good to me,” Levi said. “I know he will.”

  He waited until dark to raise the anchor, pulling the thirty meters of anchor chain hand over hand, not wanting to use even the small amount of diesel fuel the engine would consume to run the electric windlass that would have raised the chain. He unrolled the sails and drifted away from the island in the night breeze.

  I can reach Crete in two days, Levi thought. And then it will be decision time. Continue on to what is left of Eretz Yisrael, or head west for . . . whatever? Maybe one final raid on whoever is in Israel now. As an officer on the coastal patrol boat, he’d studied the methods used by Palestinians to run ashore onto deserted Israeli beaches. The Palestinians were caught more often than not because they never learned from their mistakes, Levi thought. So, maybe I’ll be the one who learned something.

  Jews made good terrorists once, against the British—at least that’s what the old men used to brag about. Stealing this wonderful boat and leaving Greek friends who’d opened their hearts to him in a time of need would be Levi’s first act of terrorism.

  He frowned—frowned knowing terrorists left few friends in their wake; frowned, knowing how effective, but how unloved, a terrorist is.

  CHAPTER 6

  The hearing was in what locals called the New Courthouse building, which meant it was the half of Boston’s main courthouse that was built in 1938 rather than the half from 1893. In the eight decades since the two halves were mated, nobody bothered to change the room numbers, so those unfamiliar often got lost or went to the wrong half.

  That probably explained why Ben Shapiro’s clients had not yet shown up for the hearing on the preliminary injunction he was seeking, a court order he hoped against hope would allow the passengers of the two ships to come ashore. Maybe they’re lost, he thought. Or maybe they took off.

  The suit was titled John Doe, John Roe, and John Coe vs. Lawrence Quaid, President of the United States of America. Each man had to stand before a judge and admit he’d escaped from the ships. Without that admission, the case would be dismissed for lack of standing. Shapiro had prepared each client to make these admissions.

  Normally, a case against the United States government would be brought in federal court, not state court. Shapiro realized, however, that this case did not stand a chance of winning in the federal court system, in which almost every judge right up to the Supreme Court had been appointed by increasingly conservative Republican presidents, Donald Trump being the standard bearer. Cutting-edge civil rights decisions these days came from state courts, interpreting state constitutions, often in a more liberal manner than their federal counterparts. Massachusetts had led the way by legalizing gay marriage, a decision based entirely on the Massachusetts constitution, a document predating the US Constitution. It was a creative but risky legal maneuver.

  The instant Shapiro learned which judge had been assigned to the case, he realized his roll of the dice had come up with legal snake eyes—a loser.

  Superior Court Justice Francis X. O’Sullivan, despite his ranting about cameras invading his courtroom, loved nothing better than to strut back and forth behind his desk and lock eyes with the cameras swiveling to remain centered on his startling white hair while he glowered down at an attorney. He had been called back from retirement to temporarily fill a vacancy on the bench. He enjoyed reminding young attorneys that he’d been wearing a black robe when they wore diapers.

  Shapiro sighed with relief when his clients appeared at the end of the corridor. The three young men were dressed in nearly identical new navy-blue suits. He ushered them into the courtroom and sat them in the first row of wooden benches.

  At precisely ten o’clock the court officer rapped his hand three times on the wall and read from the same wrinkled card he’d been reading from for ten years, “Hear ye, hear ye, hear ye. All persons having business before this Honorable Court come forth and you shall be heard. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

  Shapiro wondered, as he did nearly every time he heard those words read, why there was not a court officer in the Commonwealth who seemed capable of memorizing that short speech.

  All five foot two inches of Judge O’Sullivan stood behind his chair, the famous, custom-made low-backed high-backed chair. After a glance at the cameras to assure himself there were no technical problems, he pointed his right arm, palm down, fingers outspread like a biblical prophet,
and glared at Shapiro, completely ignoring the assistant attorney general representing the Commonwealth.

  “Mr. Sha-pie-ro, Mr. Sha-pie-ro,” O’Sullivan boomed in a shockingly deep baritone. “I take it you were so enwrapped in your legal research that you did not have time to peruse this morning’s newspaper.”

  The judge unfolded the Boston Herald and waved it back and forth in front of his chest, careful not to obscure his face from the cameras.

  President Boots Jews covered the front page of the tabloid.

  “Mr. Shapiro, you want me to disobey my commander in chief?” He threw the newspaper onto his desk. “You may not appreciate that I am a veteran, Mr. Shapiro.”

  “With all due respect, Your Honor, my clients have constitutional rights that not even the president can take from them.”

  “Who are your clients? Mr. Doe. Mr. Roe. Mr. Coe. Moe, Larry and Curley? I’ve read their affidavits. Oh, I have read them very carefully. Where are these men, these men who drop atom bombs on innocent Syrian children?”

  The judge stood on his toes, scanned from side to side, his palm over his eyebrows, like Tonto searching for his kemosabe.

  “Stand up if you are here. Stand up. Stand up.”

  With a deep breath, Shapiro turned to the three men in the front row and motioned them to rise, noticing the cameras swivel toward them.

  “For the record, Your Honor, my clients are before the court.”

  O’Sullivan snatched his newspaper and held it at arm’s length in front of his mouth, as if it would somehow ward him against contact with the men.

  “Are you the plaintiffs in this case? Did you sign those affidavits? Answer me. Answer me each of you one at a time. For the record. For the record.”