Never Again

by Harvey A. Schwartz

  The voice on the phone became muffled. Shapiro could barely make out what was said.

  The secretary came back on the line.

  “Assistant United States Attorney Judith Katz just came in. She said she can speak with you. I’ll put her right on.”

  Shapiro had never met Judy Katz, although he’d read about her in the newspapers. Shapiro intentionally avoided representing the kind of persons Katz was building a career prosecuting. Nonetheless, Shapiro expected Katz had heard about him.

  “Mr. Shapiro, this is Judy Katz. How can I help you?”

  “Ben, call me Ben, please, Judy,” Shapiro said, trying to balance between sounding firm, sounding friendly, and sounding like a “senior” member of the bar due some deference by a young Assistant US Attorney. “Judy, I have a client who was taken into custody last night by federal agents for some unknown reason and I’m trying to locate him and return him to his moderately hysterical wife. Do you suppose you could punch his name into whatever computer system you folks have for locating missing arrestees? I’d greatly appreciate it.”

  “You’ve reached the wrong person. I’m just about the only one around the office right now, and I’m also probably just about the only one in the office who has absolutely no idea about what seems to have happened last night.” The exasperation in Katz’s voice was obvious. “Um, maybe you could tell me what you know about it. I went to bed early last night, worked at home for a few hours this morning and just walked in the door here myself, and half the support staff and almost all the attorneys are not around. I’m sort of wandering around right now.”

  Judy Katz had a strong suspicion that whatever was keeping people away from the office had something to do with the Queen’s visit the previous day.

  “Judy, I’ll be blunt with you,” Shapiro said into the telephone. “I’ve been retained by Aaron Hocksberg. Do you know him, from Rudnick, Fierstein? No? Well, actually by his wife. It seems he was arrested last night, or at least that he was taken into custody.”

  “What makes you think my office has anything to do with it?” Katz asked. “Do you know what he was charged with?”

  “Well, Judy, I suspect that he was part of that thing last night, that roundup thing that is all over the news,” Shapiro said.

  Katz was puzzled.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ben. I haven’t listened to the news today.”

  “Judy, my understanding is that the Department of Justice took hundreds of people into custody last night from homes all around communities north of Boston. My further understanding, from what his wife told me, is that Attorney Aaron Hocksberg is among those taken into custody. I’ve been trying to locate him all morning. Obviously he’s being held somewhere, but everybody who is around this morning knows nothing about it, and the people who do know, people I expect work in your office, are, I’m told, universally unavailable.

  “I have to tell you, Judy, that I am having considerable difficulty believing that somebody who is the head of a criminal division in the US Attorneys office is totally unaware of a major criminal operation conducted by that office.”

  He waited for a reaction. Hearing none, he continued.

  “Look, Ms. Katz, I realize we’ve never had a case against one another before, but as you know, Boston is an extremely small town and what goes round in the legal community comes round someday. I don’t take well to being fed a bowl of bullshit by another attorney. I have a client to represent and I want to know where he is, right now.”

  “Look yourself, Mr. Shapiro. I am not feeding you bullshit, or feeding you anything at all. You seem to know a lot more than I do about what might or might not have gone on last night. I don’t know anything about any sort of roundup of criminals by my office, and I can assure you that as the head of the Organized Crime Strike Force in the office of the United States Attorney, I would have been told about any such major operation.”

  She decided to try the silent treatment herself, but after hardly more than a moment she relented, feeling guilty that her first conversation with a lawyer she respected, from a distance, had gone badly so quickly.

  “Ben, really and truly, I don’t know anything about what you’re speaking about. Tell me what you know.”

  “Okay, Judy, I’ll accept what you’re saying, although I’ve gotta tell you, I’m surprised.” Shapiro’s tone, too, was conciliatory. He didn’t enjoy hearing himself speaking sternly to a young lawyer, especially a young woman lawyer. “Judy, I didn’t say there was a roundup of criminals last night.”

  “Well, if they weren’t criminals, Ben, who were they? Who else but criminals would be rounded up by the government?”

  “I’m shocked that you, you of all people at that office, don’t know about this. And, come to think of it, the fact that you don’t know anything about this is damned frightening to me.”

  “Enough, Ben,” Katz interrupted. “Tell me, if we didn’t arrest criminals, who did we arrest?”

  “Jews, Judy, Jews. It’s all over the news. Hundreds, actually thousands of Jews were taken into custody last night and are being held. Not criminals. Jews were arrested.”

  Shapiro’s words were beyond comprehension, as if he spoke in Swahili. Then Judy remembered her odd lunch the day before.

  “Oh my God, Ben,” she said, looking around her nearly empty office. It suddenly dawned on her that the man she was speaking with was himself a Jew and a civil rights lawyer. “Ben, I think it’s time we met. Can I come by your office sometime soon? No, come to think of it, I’d rather not meet at your office, just in case. Can we casually just happen to both have lunch around noon tomorrow? I have something to talk about with you. Okay?”

  “Sure, Judy. Meet me at the Sultan’s. Do you know that place?”

  “I’ve heard of it. See you there.”

  CHAPTER 20

  President Quaid showed his agitation as Attorney General McQueeney and two deputy attorneys general walked into the Oval Office. Quaid gestured for them to sit. He remained standing, glowering, hands on his hips as he looked down at McQueeney. She was exhausted. Awake all night through the arrests, she’d flown to Washington at dawn when summoned by the president for a nine o’clock meeting.

  “Dammit, Queen. What the fuck happened out there? How the hell did those agents let themselves get killed like that? Aren’t they trained better than to walk through a door at two in the morning without even carrying their weapons? Whose fucked up idea was it that the agents wouldn’t carry weapons? I want that guy’s head.”

  “Well, that guy was me,” McQueeney said. “And as you know, Mr. President, I offered you my head, and my job, before this operation even started. I wanted nothing to do with it. You gave me no choice, sir.”

  “You know better than that,” President Quaid barked. “When I give you a job to do, your job is to do it, and do it right. Right now I’ve got two dead FBI agents to add to the body count from the dead Coasties. This is starting to look like a brand-new Boston Massacre up there, and we’re the ones getting massacred. My problem right now is the muttering I’m hearing about who is doing the killings. I don’t like it one bit. I don’t like what I’m hearing.”

  “The bigger problem we’ve got, sir, is that we took almost five thousand people into custody last night and we have no way to handle them. This whole thing was put together in such a rush, and in so much secrecy, that we didn’t have time to think through the details, sir, details such as are we going to hold all these people or release them on bail? The Boston people we can take care of; they won’t go anywhere if we let them out on bail. But all those people off the boats, they have nobody here, nothing to their names. They can’t afford to hire lawyers, and there aren’t enough lawyers in Boston to appoint to represent them all—not ones who know what they’re doing in a case like this.”

  “Dammit, Queen, don’t bother me with details. Figure it out.”

  “What are we going to do with these people? They’re families mostly, husbands, w
ives, children. Do we separate the husbands and wives in detention, or do we leave them together? If we separate them, what happens to their children? The Massachusetts Department of Social Services head just laughed when I asked her if she could take custody of nine hundred kids tomorrow. What are we going to do with these people? If we book them and release them, you know we’ll never see these people again. And, Mr. President, don’t you dare suggest we put the children in cages like you-know-who did with other refugee kids.”

  Quaid was taken aback by that.

  “We don’t release the Israelis, Queen,” the president said. “What kind of fool would I look like going to all that trouble, and losing two FBI agents? We go through all that to round these people up, only to let them loose the next day. They’d disappear on us for sure. I’d look like a horse’s ass for sure, now wouldn’t I? Queen, you are going to hold onto those people—grandparents, parents, children and Chihuahuas—until we find someplace to put them. Do you understand?”

  “Sir, Mr. President, with all due respect, how are we going to charge these people? I certainly appreciate that there are dead coastguardsmen and two federal agents. The district attorney in Boston is holding a guy from the ships in the county jail. They got him because he swam to the wrong shore and into the hands of the Boston cops. The DA’s charged the guy with ten counts of first-degree murder.

  “There is nothing that makes him any different from the other people we rounded up. If the state charges him with conspiracy to murder, then they all are murderers. If we let everybody else go, then I’m going to be faced with one angry district attorney whose murder case will go down the tubes.” McQueeney glared at the president. “Please, sir, don’t ask me to charge five thousand people with murder and expect those charges to stick. That just isn’t going to happen.”

  The two deputy attorneys general who’d accompanied their boss to the Oval Office watched silently, their heads turning in unison from one speaker to the other, like front row spectators at the Olympic ping pong finals.

  “Nobody from the ships gets turned loose, Queen,” President Quaid said sternly, standing directly in front of the seated attorney general, his legs spread apart, his hands on his hips. His initial frenzy had subsided almost to a monotone.

  McQueeney was undeterred. “We’re holding these people at a basketball stadium at Boston University, and we have that only because the stadium was built on the location of a former National Guard armory and somebody inserted some bizarre language into the purchase agreement that the government can preempt any other use of the stadium in a time of national emergency. So we’re holding five thousand people in a basketball stadium for today.

  “But that won’t last long. The TV crews are having a field day there, interviewing Jewish grandmothers who came off that ship, spent a few days in suburban land visiting shopping malls, and now find themselves crammed into a domed stadium wondering if they are going to be shipped off to Syrian concentration camps. It’s going to make great copy. Remember Katrina and the Superdome? Think Jewish instead of black. That’s tonight’s news, sir.”

  Before President Quaid could reply the telephone on his desk rang.

  “Good, send him in,” he said. “Grant Farrell is here. I woke him this morning with the news of the roundup last night, and I asked him to spend the morning speaking with folks on the Hill. I want to hear what he has to say.”

  Grant Farrell, Democratic minority leader of the Senate, entered. He did not look pleased.

  “Mr. President, Madam Attorney General.”

  “So, how are folks taking the latest news, Grant?” the president asked.

  “Not well, sir, not well at all. Each and every senator I spoke with this morning—and I got to people on both sides of the aisle, Mr. President—the first thing every single person said was about the two dead agents, not about what a good job we did rounding people up, not about what a difficult decision this must have been, not even, as I would have expected, some song and dance about civil rights after we dragged a thousand citizens from their beds and hauled them off. No sir, it was all about the dead agents.”

  The president glared at his attorney general.

  “Let me tell you what Senator Jackwell said; you know, Jake Jackwell, Wisconsin, as screamer of a liberal as we’ve got on board. Well, Jake dragged me off to the side of the senators’locker room this morning when I was only halfway into my workout gear and said—here’s as good a quote as I can give you, sir, and these are his words, not mine—he said the score seems to be Jews twelve, Americans zero. Then he asked me, when do we start to even things up?”

  The president, staring at his feet, listening, raised his head.

  “Jake Jackwell did not say that, did he, Grant?”

  “Those are as close as I can get to his words, sir. Losing those FBI agents last night has people awfully angry. It’s as if we’re being gunned down by foreigners who came to our country armed and ready for a fight, and all we’re doing is threatening to give them speeding tickets. People are angry, Mr. President. There are two more bodies to be buried. That makes two heavy media events we’ve got to get through. What are you going to do, Mr. President?”

  Before President Quaid could answer, McQueeney spoke.

  “That’s not fair, Senator, nor is it accurate. Those FBI agents were shot by a US citizen, by a man who thought he was defending his home from what to him could have looked like a break-in in the middle of the night. There were no armed foreigners involved in that shooting. At least get your facts right.”

  “Stop thinking like a lawyer, Queen,” Quaid said. “You’re letting the facts get in the way. I’m afraid, Queen, that Jake Jackwell is closer to the general public than we are on this one. He doesn’t see any difference between the foreign citizens on those two boats and the US citizens who got them off the boats, at least not when it comes to taking shots at US agents.”

  “With all due respect, sir,” McQueeney retorted, “he’s wrong then.”

  “No, he’s not wrong, Queen,” the president answered, making no effort to conceal his impatience with the attorney general. “That guy, whatever his name is, who killed the agents is going to be viewed as much as a foreign agent as the people from the boats. Those new deaths make even the US citizens involved seem like . . . somebody give me some sort of legal term to use, like . . .”

  “Enemy combatants, sir. That’s what they all are. Enemy combatants, if I may, sir,” interjected one of the two deputy attorneys general.

  “Enemy combatant? Does that have some specific legal meaning?” Quaid asked.

  “Enemy combatant has a very specific meaning, Mr. President,” the deputy said, seeming to gain confidence with each word. “The Al Qaida detainees at Guantanamo Bay were classified as enemy combatants. That shoe bomber who tried to blow up a flight from London to Boston was called an enemy combatant. The Supreme Court said even US citizens could be labeled enemy combatants. It didn’t matter where they came from, citizen or not. They all got the same label: enemy combatant.”

  He looked at his boss, seeking approval to continue. McQueeney sat motionless, exhausted, ignoring him, ignoring the president. The deputy continued.

  “Legally, Mr. President, you have the power to label anybody an enemy combatant and no court in the land has jurisdiction to hear any challenge to that designation by you, sir. No judge has the power to hear or decide any case brought by an enemy combatant, thanks to our wise Congress.”

  “How can that be?” Quaid asked.

  “Mr. President, the defense appropriation act of 2005 stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear any legal proceeding, including an application for a writ of habeas corpus, brought by any enemy combatant detained by this country at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

  “A few years later, after some clever lawyers were able to file their habeas petitions within hours of their clients being taken into custody in Afghanistan, before they actually arrived at Gitmo, Congress extended that stripping
of court jurisdiction to all cases brought by all persons declared by the president to be enemy combatants. Once you put that label on him, whether he is an Afghan bomb thrower or a Cleveland Boy Scout, he lives outside the laws of the United States of America. He has no rights, or, more accurately, he has all the rights every American has, but he has nowhere to go to enforce any violations of those rights. Congress shut the courthouse doors to everybody who you, Mr. President, declare to be an enemy combatant.”

  The President glanced at McQueeney, waiting for her to contradict what the deputy just said. She said nothing.

  “Okay,” President Quaid said. “I’ve got the picture. Queen, I hear what you are saying. Young man, thank you for your legal insight. Grant, let’s talk later this afternoon. Keep speaking with people, then give me a call. Me, I have some serious thinking to do. For now, Queen, keep those people fed and comfortable. See what you can come up with for them. And try to keep the news media away from them. I’ll talk with you first thing tomorrow morning.”

  After the Oval Office cleared out, the president asked his assistant to locate the First Lady.

  Catherine, my love. Don’t abandon me now, of all times. I need you more than ever right now, here with me, Quaid thought. And Catherine, maybe you ought to bring that bright son of a bitch Bobby Brown back here, too.

  CHAPTER 21

  Debra Reuben spoke sweetly into the telephone, shivering in the damp air, using the pay phone outside the Brooklin, Maine, post office. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to speak to another adult; it had been so long since she’d spoken with anybody but Levi, the Mossad men in Spain or the hard-eyed soldiers in the desert at Dimona, putting aside that little incident at Jost van Dyke.

  “Sarah, this is Debbie, Debbie Reuben. I know it’s been a while . . .” Reuben tried not to sound too desperate. Sarah Goldberg, now Sarah Goldberg-Goldhersh, was Reuben’s sorority sister at Delta Phi Epsilon at Syracuse University. They stayed close for several years after graduation but drifted apart when Sarah became involved with Abram Goldhersh. He’d dragged her, reluctantly at first, then deeper and deeper, into right-wing Jewish politics. Goldhersh was a supporter of Amana, the West Bank settlement movement in Israel. He’d helped found a settlement on the Golan Heights itself but was delegated to return to the US where he was born, to recruit and fundraise. Reuben kept abreast of her friend’s exploits, but only remotely over websites.