27 – North of Boston
Jonathan Kantor had not left his house for more than a half hour since the bomb destroyed Tel Aviv. One thought loomed so large and dominant in his mind that he could not drive it away, could not keep it from repeating over and over and over and over in his head.
“I should have been there. It should have been me. I should have been there. It should have been me.”
Kantor’s wife Elaine and their twin daughters, Rachel and Rebecca, were visiting Elaine’s parents in Israel, a visit scheduled and postponed repeatedly until finally, with her mother discharged from the hospital “with not so good news,” Elaine could put the trip off no longer. Arrangements were made, tickets were bought, dog sitters were scheduled, all was set. Until Kantor’s boss at Ridgefield Sherring Wilson, which billed itself as Boston’s “premier” patent law firm, struck a tree on his mountain bike and ended up home in bed for what looked like a long period of trying to at least recall the names of his family members. There was no way Kantor could leave the office for even a day, even a weekend, much less the three-week Israel trip. He stayed home.
Kantor was at his desk in his Boston office when his wife and children were incinerated into radioactive dust in the dining room of her parents' Tel Aviv condominium, a block from Ground Zero. There were no body parts to recover, not that anybody looked.
“I should have been there. It should have been me.”
Kantor’s Bushmaster AR15 semi-automatic rifle - the “California version” of the military M16, modified to meet the strict gun requirements of states like California and Massachusetts to limit automatic repeat features and reduce the number of rounds per magazine - lay on Kantor’s carefully tung oiled Crate & Barrel maple kitchen table, looking as out of place as a dog turd on a Persian rug. Kantor bought the gun three years earlier after two men jimmied a living room window late at night and crept into the house while he and Elaine were sleeping, only to run from the house when a police car drove by with its siren blaring, on the way to another incident entirely. Kantor pictured himself and Elaine, Rachel and Rebecca, helpless in their upstairs bedrooms as the two men crept up the stairs with who knows what on their minds, knives or guns or ropes in their hands.
That image of helplessness, especially helplessness to defend his family, haunted Kantor until he finally did what he had been thinking of doing for years. He bought a gun.
The weapon had never been fired. Having it was enough for Kantor. It went into the bedroom closet, bullets in the clip, ready to fire the next time there were late night footsteps on the stairway. That was all he wanted. He was satisfied.
The weapon was moved from the closet to the kitchen table a week after Tel Aviv.
“It should have been me. It should have been me.”
The phrase ran through Kantor’s mind like a Motown song, endlessly, unstoppable. He visualized using the gun on himself. He sat at the kitchen table and played with it, disassembled it and reassembled it. Removed the ammo clip and jammed it home. Toyed with the trigger. One time, after a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau - not bad, a bit too sweet, should have been chilled more - he put the muzzle on the tips of his lips and stretched his right arm to see if he could reach the trigger.
He could.
But he did not use the weapon, did not take the final step. He didn’t know if he was afraid to do it, or ashamed. Elaine would have never let him forget it if he did something that stupid, actually, if he did something that clichéd. She, and he, had too much class to blow his brains out, alone, in his own kitchen.
And, he thought, who would find him, and how long would it take to find him, and what would he smell like by then? No, the rifle lay on the table, cleaned, loaded, ready, but now untouched.
Instead of killing himself, Kantor watched the television news. He absorbed everything he could from Israel, or what had been Israel. When word reached the leadership of the North Shore Jewish Council that Elaine and the Kantor girls had been in Tel Aviv, calls were made to Kantor. He was invited to memorial services, to substitute funerals. He was urged to join others in grieving.
Sometimes, he went out. But mostly he stayed home. He stayed home and thought for the first time in a long time what it actually meant to him to be Jewish. It had not meant anything in particular. Long ago in the past, Kantor realized, how could he not realize, some people didn’t especially like Jews, in fact, some people hated Jews. For him, though, that sort of blatant hatred, blatant anti-Semitism, was something that happened in other times, other places, to other people. It happened years ago in Europe, not here. It happened now but far away in the Middle East, not here in America
Kantor and his family, like most American Jews, were untouched by anti-Semitism.
The Tel Aviv bomb brought home to Kantor the reality that people who wanted to kill Jews could reach him, had reached him and had taken from him the most important things in his life. The light bulb went off that the anti-Semites, the Jew haters and killers, could get to him, too. That was another reason the Bushmaster AR15 came out of the closet. The bad guys creeping up the stairs began to take on personas in his mind. Nothing so specific as a Hitler mustache or Arab robes, but something unsettling, ominous, after him specifically, not just his money or his electronics or his wife’s jewelry.
When the phone call came asking if he could put a few people up for a few nights, the words went in one ear and out the other. Kantor did not remember how he answered. But his name had made a list, a list of people called for help. And next to his name, next to Jonathan Kantor, 26 Endicott Drive, Peabody, Massachusetts, for some reason somebody placed a check mark.
Kantor slept in front of the television most days, making up for his sleepless nights, nights of listening for footsteps on the stairs, footsteps of ominous strangers coming for him, nights of whispers - “it should have been me” - in his head. Some nights he sat at his bedroom window and stared at the dark street until the sky lightened.
That was what Kantor was doing when he stared out his window and tried to put together what was happening outside on the street. Black cars, no police markings but lots of radio antennas, stopped in front of houses. Pairs of men in dark suits got out and rang door bells and went inside. At 1:30 in the morning, at 2:00 in the morning. Not all the houses, just a few. And then people began coming out their doors, neighbors, some people he knew well, some people he barely recognized. And with them were other people, families it seemed, people Kantor did not recognize at all. They were led to the sidewalk and placed in clusters, standing there until, until, and this perplexed Kantor more than anything else, a yellow Peabody school bus appeared and rolled slowly down the street, stopping at each cluster for the people to get on board, then rolling on to the next group of people, where they, too, got on.
All in silence, all without Kantor hearing a word spoken. All up and down quiet Endicott Drive. Kantor was stunned and could not figure out what was happening or even whether he was so sleep deprived that he was hallucinating.
Then he understood, understood which houses the men were going up to, which people were being led to the yellow bus.
They are rounding up the Jews, Kantor said to himself. They are skipping the Christian houses. They are rounding up Jews. They’re arresting all the Jews in Peabody, he thought aloud.
Then he thought. “They’ll come for me soon. I’m next.”
Kantor flopped back in his bedroom chair at that thought. I’m upstairs in my bedroom and the men who will be coming up the stairs to get me are right now driving their black SUV down my street and will be stopping in front of my house and will walk up my walkway and will pound on my door any minute, any second now, he thought. A cold sweat broke out on Kantor’s face as he realized this.
Its real. Its happening. He looked out the window. A black SUV stopped in front of his house. Two men got out and began walking toward his door.
Am I hallucinating all this? Is this real, he thought. And then ...
POUND POUND POUND.
It sounded like a hammer on his front door. Kantor stood up and looked around frantically. He looked at the window. Should I jump out and run away? The window led to the garage roof. He took a step toward the window and stopped.
POUND POUND POUND.
If they’re waiting in front, they’ll be waiting in the back, too. He looked toward the hallway door, half expecting two men to walk right into the bedroom.
Then Kantor’s eyes slowly moved toward the bedroom closet, where his carefully pressed suits and polished black shoes were lined up. The bedroom closet where he kept his gun.
Kantor’s legs buckled under him as he realized that there was no gun in the closet. The gun lay on his kitchen table.
POUND POUND POUND.
Kantor raced out of the bedroom and down the stairs, almost falling over his feet as he hit the bottom landing and turned toward the kitchen, running inside his own house faster than he had run inside his own house since the day he and Elaine moved in. He heard a jiggling, clinking sound from the door jimmy the FBI agents used to force the lock as he reached the kitchen and snatched the Bushmaster from the table, reaching forward to slam the 15-round ammunition clip home.
He turned and faced the front door as FBI agents William Moriarty and Angelo Ansella threw the door open and walked slowly into the dark entryway.
“Is anybody home,” Moriarty yelled. “Is Jonathan Kantor here?”
They know my name, Kantor thought.
Kantor did not wait for the two men to see him walking from the kitchen into the front hallway. As soon as he saw the men dressed in nearly identical black suits, Kantor raised the rifle, jerked the trigger again and again and again until the two men lay on the floor, motionless.
Then Kantor sat in his living room and waited for the other men, the ones he knew would still come to round up the rest of the Jews.
He was pleased now that he had not pulled the trigger when he’d placed the rifle barrel in his mouth. He was pleased and proud that he stood up against the evil that took his wife and daughters. He went into the kitchen and grabbed the rest of his ammunition. He wanted to be ready when the other men came.
Fifteen minutes later, tear gas canisters crashed through windows from all sides of his house. Kantor ran out the back door, firing the Bushmaster AR15 without aiming until he ran out of ammunition. He was lifting it over his head to demonstrate that it was empty when bullets from three sharpshooters’ rifles pulverized his skull.
Kantor had time only for one last thought.
“It should have been me.”