89 – Boston
Shapiro dropped the two women off at Judy Katz’s apartment in Boston shortly before midnight. Sarah Goldberg would spend the night there, then take the first Downeaster train in the morning from Boston to Portland. She’d telephoned her husband from a pay phone at a McDonalds in Hartford, Connecticut. Surprisingly, there was no answer at her home. She left a cryptic message assuring Abram she was safe and would be home the following morning.
Shapiro continued driving north of Boston, arriving at his house a little after 1:00 a.m.. He could hear the waves slapping at the dock at the end of the wooden walkway leading to the saltmarsh behind the house. The full moon shining on the water brought to mind a memory of a magical night he and Sally had experienced several summers ago when a full moon and a high tide coincided late at night to raise the water level on the saltmarsh over the banks of the creeks and channels, flooding the marsh surface. They’d paddled their kayaks over the grassy surface of the marsh while the full moon reflected off the water’s surface, blurring the line between sea and sky so they felt as if they were gliding through the air, rather than over the still, shallow water.
That memory burst, however, as Shapiro pulled into his driveway. He was surprised to see a car parked there and a light on in the house. For the briefest moment his heart speeded up at the thought that Sally had changed her mind about moving out. He recognized the car, however. Sally’s mother. Why in the world would she be at his house, Shapiro wondered.
He drove down his dead-end street without noticing the dark Ford Crown Victoria parked under a tree, which blocked the nearest street lamp. Two men sat in the car, taking turns napping and watching the rearview mirror.
Shapiro unlocked his front door and called out as he walked into the house. The television was on in the family room. He walked into that room and found his wife’s mother, Emily Spofford, sleeping on the couch in front of the TV. Ironically, a commercial for “non-habit forming” sleep aids blared from the television. Shapiro turned off the set, then placed his hand on his mother-in-law’s shoulder and shook her lightly.
Her eyes opened instantly and a startled yelp came from her mouth as she focused on the man, whose hand was still on her shoulder. As she recognized her son-on-law, Emily Spofford ran her hands through her full white hair and sat up.
“I’m sorry, Ben. I must have dozed off,” she said, hurriedly arranging her clothing and pulling the hem of her skirt down past her knees.
“Emily, what are you doing here?” Shapiro said. “Where’s Sally? Where’s Adam?” He looked toward the stairs leading to his bedroom. “Are they sleeping?”
His mother-in-law’s next action shocked him more than finding her asleep on his sofa had done. The woman leapt to her feet and threw her arms around Shapiro, hugging him close to her. He reluctantly and unenthusiastically reciprocated, skeptical about why this woman, who’d never displayed the least warmth toward him since the first time Sally brought him home for Thanksgiving dinner their senior year of college, was clinging to him. Finally, after a tolerant thirty seconds, he pushed her away from him.
“What the hell is going on, Emily?” he said.
“Ben, oh, poor Ben,” the woman said, tears now running down her cheeks. “Oh Ben, they’re gone. They’re both gone. I’m so sorry for you. Oh, Ben it’s such a tragedy.”
“What do you mean, gone?” he demanded. “Gone where? Where are they, Emily?”
“Ben,” she replied. “They’re dead, poor Sally and little Adam. They were at that, that mall, that shopping mall when that horrible bomb went off, when that goddamn Jew set off ...” She stopped abruptly, realizing what she had just said.
“I meant, when that terrorist set off that bomb. At the North Shore Mall. They were there. Oh Ben, it’s so horrible. I didn’t even know they were there. Sally called to say she and Adam would be, would be coming to stay with me, but they never arrived, they never came. I didn’t know what was happening. I kept calling the house but she never answered. I called all through the night.
“Then, just yesterday, two police officers came to the house. They asked me if I was Sally Spofford’s mother. They asked if I knew where you were and I said I thought you’d gone away for a few days. Sally told me you insisted on going to that Jewish demonstration in Washington. I didn’t tell the police that, of course.
“And they showed me Sally’s bag, that ugly Betsy Karen bag with the big yellow daisy on it that she bought last year. Ben, it was all torn up. It was horrible, black marks all over it.
“Then they told me they’d recovered what they believed was her body, at the North Shore Mall, at the food court. Oh Ben, they said they weren’t sure it was her, they couldn’t identify the body. They asked me to come to the morgue and I did and it was her, at least I’m pretty sure it was her. I hardly looked.”
Shapiro grabbed the woman by the shoulders.
“Adam,” he shouted. “What about Adam?”
“Oh Ben,” the woman cried. “I asked them where Adam was. I explained that she had a son. His name was Adam. They told me there were some children they couldn’t identify, five children. And Ben, I had to look at all of them, those horrible, broken bodies of children.
“Adam was the last one they showed me. He looked so beautiful, so peaceful. Then they pulled the cover all the way off his face and, oh Ben, he had no mouth, no chin.”
The woman collapsed onto the sofa. Shapiro stood in front of her, his body shaking. White spots appeared in front of his eyes, dancing across what seemed to be the surface of his eyeballs. The next thing he knew he was lying on the floor in a heap, cold, clammy sweat on his forehead. He sat on the floor, unable to move, she lay on the sofa, neither person able to offer the slightest comfort to the other.
They sat and lay that way for more than ten minutes, every effort to get up lost to a feeling of complete helplessness.
Shapiro was shocked by a pounding on the front door. He had no idea how long it had been going on, but the sound became louder, faster, more insistent. He lifted himself up from the floor and slowly shambled to the door.
“Who the hell is it?” he yelled at the front door.
The answering yell was equally loud. “FBI. Ben Shapiro. Let us in. Open the door.”
That response got Shapiro’s immediate attention. The wave of sorrow drained from him. He turned the porch light on and opened the door. Two men stood there. Without asking, they walked past him into the hall. One man spoke.
“Ben Shapiro.” He said. It was not a question. It was a statement. He held a photograph of Shapiro in his hand, Shapiro’s driver’s license photo, printed out from the Registry of Motor Vehicles database.
“We’ve been waiting for you for quite a while, Mr. Shapiro. We need to speak with you. Right away. It’s important.”
“You might say it’s a matter of national security, Mr. Shapiro,” the other man said, moving to stand beside Shapiro.
Shapiro looked from one man to the other.
“This is the wrong time for this,” he said softly. “We’ll get together tomorrow, wait, maybe not tomorrow, I’ll have things to do tomorrow, arrangements. Look, this is just the wrong time for this.”
He reached for the door.
“You have to leave now,” he said, opening the door.
One of the men placed his palm on the door and shoved it closed.
“You don’t understand, Mr. Shapiro,” he said. “We’ve been sitting out there all day and halfway through the night. We’re not going to do this some other time. We’re going to talk now, right now.”
The other man placed his hand on Shapiro’s upper arm.
“We’re going to chat right now, buddy, and then you’re going to come along with us and you’ll chat with some friends of ours down on the Cape a little more. Is that clear?”
Shapiro looked at the men. One stood directly between the door and Shapiro. The other man was on Shapiro’s right side, his hand resting lightly on Shapiro’s upper arm, ready to clamp down if Shapiro attempted to move away.
Shapiro gestured with his head toward the left, toward the kitchen, away from the family room.
“We can sit down in there,” he said. “Look, this is a rough time for me. I’ll make some coffee. I need it.”
“Fine,” the first agent said. “That’s much better.”
He turned toward the kitchen, then stopped, frozen. He looked up at the men, FBI, they would know, maybe Sally’s mother was wrong. “My wife, my son,” he mumbled. “Did they really die?”
The two men glanced at one another, surprised. “We don’t know shit about your wife, buddy,” one man answered, none too kindly. “But we know all about you.”
They went into the kitchen, Shapiro attempted to keep the men from noticing the older woman in the family room, who by this time had settled into a deep, relieving sleep on the sofa, her message delivered. Shapiro poured ground coffee from a small brown paper bag into the coffee press and put a teakettle on the stove to boil. He removed three cups from the cabinet. He drank his coffee black. He did not offer milk or sugar to the men.
Neither man sat at the kitchen table. One stood near the doorway to the front hall. The other man remained close to Shapiro, staying between him and the other exit from the kitchen. The three men remained standing until the water boiled and Shapiro poured it into the coffee press, which he placed on the kitchen table.
Shapiro sat at the table, then one FBI agent sat on either side of him. He poured three cups of coffee. The agents eyed their steaming cups enviously but neither touched them.
“OK, so what is this all about?” Shapiro asked after taking an intentionally long time sipping his hot coffee. “I have to tell you two that, that I’m in no mood for conversation right now. This is the wrong time. I can’t talk. The wrong time.”
They ignored his protest. He pushed his chair back, intending to stand and lead the men to the door. Two hands, one from each side of him, pushed his shoulders down, dropping Shapiro back into the kitchen chair. A man of words, Shapiro was stunned at being shoved.
“Don’t you assholes know what happened to my wife, my son?” he screamed. The two men’s faces were blank. Instead, one of the agents spun his chair to face Shapiro.
“We’re told, buddy, that you can identify the Israeli soldiers held on Cape Cod,” the agent said. “That is correct?”
Shapiro smiled wearily. “So that’s what this is all about,” he said, remembering his telephone conversation with the District Attorney about his client, Howie Mandelbaum.
“I can’t identify anybody,” Shapiro said. “I told District Attorney McDonough that my client, Mr. Mandelbaum, theoretically he might be able to identify certain persons who were on those ships who were affiliated with the Israel Defense Forces, theoretically, I said. And that was in return for consideration concerning the criminal charges pending against him. That’s what I said. It was all ‘theoretical.’” His hands placed quotation marks around the last word.
The agent to Shapiro’s right slammed his palm down on the table so forcefully that the two full coffee cups in front of the agents spilled over their rims. Neither man made any move to wipe up the coffee running across the table top.
“Cut the crap, asshole,” the agent shouted. “We aren’t dealing with some state crime shoot-em-up here. This is serious. National Security. We aren’t playing little plea bargain games, not now. Is that clear?”
Shapiro did not answer.
The other agent pushed his chair back and stood up, then bent down to bring his face level with Shapiro’s.
“The DA didn’t say squat about any theoretical. He didn’t say it was your client who could make the ID. He said you told him that you,” he poked Shapiro roughly in the chest, “you could ID these people.
“Or should I say your former client?” He looked across at the other agent.
A puzzled expression crossed Shapiro’s face.
The agent continued, “Mr. Mandelbaum, most unfortunately for all of us, took a flyer in the middle of the night last night. He is no longer with us.”
“A flyer?” Shapiro said, looking back and forth from one man to the other.
“Yeah, he played Superman,” the first agent said. “Off the fifth tier balcony at Charles Street Jail. Either jumped or was tossed, not that it matters much either way. Broke his neck. Tragic. They say he was buck naked.”
“All that matters, asshole, is that you are the only one who can ID those Jew soldiers who killed the Coasties. Even more than that, we’re told those soldiers might know something about the atom bomb the Jews smuggled into this country.
“You care about this country, don’t you, Mr. Shapiro? This is still your country, isn’t it?”
“Yes, yes, of course this is my country,” Shapiro said quickly, stunned by news of his client’s death. Shapiro remembered his last conversation with Mandelbaum. Maybe he did jump, he thought.
Sally. Adam. Too much death. His head spun.
The second agent, the one still seated, stood up and slowly moved behind Shapiro. He grabbed the back of Shapiro’s chair and yanked it away from the table.
“Enough of this bullshit,” he said. “Get up. You’re coming with us. You’re going to ID those Jew soldiers and you and your buddies are going to tell us everything there is to know about this atom bomb.”
“Where are we going?” Shapiro asked. He wanted to close his eyes and find these two men gone. “This is all a mistake,” he said quietly. “I have no idea who the Israeli soldiers are. I never said I could pick them out. It was my client, he could do that. And I don’t know anything about any bombs, any atom bombs.”
The men grabbed his elbows and lifted him to a standing position.
“Where are you taking me?” Shapiro asked.
One of the agents grabbed Shapiro by the upper arm, no gentleness in his grasp this time.
“We’re going for a drive down to the Cape, Camp Edwards. Look buddy, we’re just the delivery guys. All we do is pick you up and drop you off for the experts down there. The experts are the ones who’ll be chatting with you.”
“Experts?” Shapiro asked.
“Yeah, the experts, the interrogators. Military interrogators. You heard the President, didn’t you. You’re an enemy combatant, buddy. We turn you over to the military and they make you talk. That’s how it works.”
“They make everybody talk,” the other agent said, a smile on his face. “You know, like the car dealer, everybody talks.”
“And nobody walks,” his partner finished for him with a matching smile.
“Especially about bombs, like that one that took down the Washington Monument, and the atom bomb, the one you don’t know anything about. You’ll puke your guts out once the military guys work on you, won’t you buddy?”
Shapiro was suddenly silent. Atom bomb? The news about his wife and son had overwhelmed his memory of what Sarah Goldberg said about what lay at the deep end of her Portland, Maine swimming pool. Oh my God, Shapiro thought. Oh my God. I do know something. They’ll get me to tell them, too. He had no pretensions about what the government would do to him to discover information about a terrorist bomb plot.
And he had no pretensions about his ability to withstand torture. He couldn’t even watch scenes of violence in movies without covering his eyes.
Sarah. That woman she told us about from the sailboat and the Israeli guy who was killed. Judy Katz, Sarah’s at Judy’s house. Sally. Adam. The man they shot at the toll plaza. The Washington Monument tumbling to the ground. It all combined in Shapiro’s mind into one confusing goulash.
In his mind, he saw himself spread-eagled on a steel table, a hooded medieval torturer approaching him with black iron implements, glowing red from the hot coals they’d been resting on. The Spanish Inquisition.
I have to get away, he thought.
One man still gripped Shapiro’s arm. The other agent stood in the doorway leading to the front hall. Shapiro thought rapidly.
“OK. I understand. I’ll be glad to help,” he said. “I don’t know much about anything, but I’ll tell everything I know. OK?”
“Fine, wonderful, now let’s go,” the man holding his arm said, not relaxing his grip.
“Look, can I change my clothes first, real quick,” Shapiro asked. “I’ve been wearing this for two days now. Hey, let me get on some clean underwear and socks and I’ll talk my head off.” He smiled at the men. “My bedroom’s upstairs. Just give me thirty seconds.”
The men looked at one another. The man by the door spoke.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll check it out first, though.”
The three men went up the stairs to Shapiro’s bedroom. Shapiro stopped short when he saw Sally’s clothing folded neatly in open drawers in her dresser. An empty suitcase lay on the bed.
Shapiro opened several drawers, removing clean underwear, socks and a sweat shirt. He turned to the men.
“Any chance of a bit of privacy,” he asked.
Before answering, the two agents glanced around the room. One man went to the bedroom window, lifted it and looked around outside, seeing that the room was on the second floor and that no trees were within reach. It was a twenty-five foot drop to the gravel pathway below the window.
“OK, we’ll be right outside the door,” he said to Shapiro, gesturing to his partner. The men walked out the bedroom door, leaving it ajar.
Shapiro dropped the clean clothes on the floor and quickly stepped to the window, which the agent had left open. Shapiro lifted the hinged lid on the upholstered chest in front of the window and removed a white plastic box with bright red lettering, Fire Friend. From inside the box he pulled a length of yellow rope with white plastic steps at intervals. Two shiny steel hooks were attached to the ends of the two parallel lengths of rope. Shapiro shoved the chest away from the wall and snapped the steel hooks onto two steel eyebolts sunk into the wall, near the floor. He threw the yellow rope out the window.
All this took no more than five seconds. He’d practiced doing just that, years before. Before Adam was born.
Thank you, Sally, he muttered. Thank you for being so afraid of fire, so afraid of being trapped in our second floor bedroom by a fire on the stairs. I laughed at you at the time, but I came home with this contraption and you made me practice it, even though you chickened out on actually climbing down the outside of the house for our mock fire drill.
Shapiro climbed out the window and made his way down the swaying ladder. Just before he reached the ground a head appeared in the window.
“Shit,” the FBI agent shouted. The head retracted. Shapiro heard a shout through the open window. “Get downstairs. Now. He’s bogeying.”
Shapiro dropped to the ground, thinking quickly. He glanced at the driveway and saw a black sedan parked directly behind his own Mercedes, blocking it from backing out the driveway. He looked around frantically, then spotted the wooden walkway leading to the dock on the saltmarsh.
The full moon showed the flood tide just ebbing, draining the water out to the nearby ocean.
Shapiro sprinted down the walkway to the end of the dock. Resting upside down in a crooked frame he’d constructed from graying two-by-fours was Shapiro’s red fiberglass kayak, eighteen sleek feet long. A double-bladed paddle was jammed inside the boat.
Shapiro hefted the forty-five pound boat off the storage rack and dropped it in the water at the end of the dock. He sat on the edge of the dock and held the boat in place with his right foot. He heard shouts coming from the house.
“He’s by the fucking water,” a voice shouted. “This way. Hustle you lard ass.”
Shapiro lowered himself from the dock into the center cockpit in the kayak, holding the long paddle in his left hand while he held onto the dock to steady himself with his right hand. He heard footsteps pounding down the wooden walkway as he shoved off from the dock and began paddling furiously away from the house, out into the marsh, toward the ocean a half mile away.
When fifty feet of water, which Shapiro knew to be only inches deep as the flood tide covered the top of the grass that made up the saltmarsh, separated him from the shore, he glanced back and saw the two FBI agents standing on the end of the dock. Both held handguns.
“Come back here or we’ll shoot, asshole,” one man shouted. Shapiro saw him raise his gun and point it directly at the kayak, brightly illuminated by the full moon.
The other agent shoved the man’s arm aside.
“Can’t interrogate a corpse, dummy,” he said. “Get back to the car and get on the radio. Call, I don’t know, the Coast Guard or somebody.”
Shapiro paddled away from the house. There was a marina at the mouth of the river that the marsh fed into. The marina would be closed, but there was a telephone booth there.
He paddled quickly. One step at a time, he thought, ignoring the breathtaking beauty of gliding over the shallow water with the reflection of the full moon breaking into kaleidoscopic sparkles where it reflected from the ripples on the surface.
Sally had talked about that magic night on the water so many times, Shapiro thought. Sally. He choked. Adam. Adam. Why would they kill you? Who could kill a child? Shapiro, a man who had never, as an adult, struck another person, felt his anger well up into a desire for revenge.
The telephone booth next to the gas pump at the marina was brightly lit. Who do I call, Shapiro wondered. Not my law partners. They wouldn’t let me run from the FBI. They’d want to fight my arrest in court, argue with a judge while I sat in an interrogation room.
He reached into his pocket. It was still there, the yellow post-it note on which Judy Katz had written her home telephone number before getting out of Shapiro’s car earlier that night.
It took three tries before Shapiro managed to punch in the correct set of numbers to charge the call to his credit card. A sleepy voice answered on the sixth ring.
“Judy, it’s Ben,” he whispered, not knowing why he was whispering. “I need you to come get me right now. I’ll explain when you get here.”
He gave her directions to Pavilion Beach, a rocky stretch a half mile from the marina. It was a popular launching site for kayakers and had a small parking lot. It would be deserted that early in the morning.
“Judy,” Shapiro said before hanging up. “You’d better bring Sarah with you. I don’t think we’ll be going back to your place, not for a while.” His credit card call would be traced to her house, he thought. I’ll have to warn her.
He wriggled back into the kayak and paddled along the channel and out to the ocean, following the shore the short distance to the rendezvous. Arriving, he started to pull the boat above the tide line. He stopped and considered, then pushed the kayak back out through the small waves breaking on the beach, watching the ebbing tide carry it along the shore and out to sea. I hope the Coast Guard finds it, he thought. Maybe they'll think I drowned. He walked up the beach and sat behind a stand of tall beach grass to wait for the two women to arrive.
Just a few hours ago I was sitting in the nation’s capital next to the First Lady, he thought. And now her husband’s soldiers are taking hundreds of thousands of Americans, Jewish Americans, to detention camps and the FBI wants to hand me over to military interrogators to find out about a secret nuclear weapon.
How did it come to this so quickly, he thought. And where is it going from here?
And why is Sally dead? Adam, Adam.
He sat on the sand surrounded by tall beach grass, struggling to keep his head from nodding off from exhaustion, physical and emotional. He waited for headlights to appear, the right headlights.