CHAPTER 1

FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 1981

 

-1-

 

Attorney Mary Ann Devlin, Maddie to everyone but the judges before whom she appeared every day, tried to persuade herself it was too hot to do her daily calisthenics, Royal Canadian Air Force Exercises, Level 5, on the three or four days a week she did not run five fast miles along the Charles River, outrunning the druggies and derelicts who often showed up on her client list in the Criminal Session of the Boston Municipal Court.

Maddie’s salary as a public defender with Suffolk County Legal Services did not allow the luxury of membership in an athletic club with state-of-the-art equipment, autocrats masquerading as exercise leaders, and a swimming pool to stretch the long muscles of her back and legs. Dues at the YWCA, as low as they were, were also out of reach. She purchased her running shoes, factory seconds of the brands worn by the Boston Marathon’s elite runners, on the grey market from a pushcart hidden among the produce stalls in Haymarket. At her age, halfway between thirty and forty, she was thin, but softly firm, with her mother’s auburn hair, an oak leaf in autumn which had just peaked. If beauty lay in the genes, hers–like Trish Devlin Sullivan’s, like Katie Devlin’s, like all the Devlin women’s–was her birthright. Her beauty, however, did not extend to her voice. Aged by circumstance, it was shrill and shaky like that of an opera singer no longer able to hit her notes; a voice so perfect in the court-room, so mood breaking in the bedroom.

Maddie dug the TV remote out from the pile of unread magazines beneath her night table–The New Yorker, The Economist, Vogue–to feed her craving for things not found in the world she grew up in, and clicked on the morning news. Framed in black bunting, nine-year-old Bumper Sullivan’s boyish face filled the screen, a school photo, wearing a white shirt and clip-on tie that sagged from one collar. His hair swooped across his forehead; his smile was a shade shy of a smirk. In a halting voice, the announcer recounted how Bumper’s bloodless body had been found by his father, Mayor Charles Sullivan, in the library of the Capablanca Chess Club the previous evening.

“According to high-level sources in the police department,” the announcer continued,” a skull-cap belonging to Avram Levy, also a member of the Club, had been found near the body. Levy is in custody and his arraignment is scheduled for this afternoon.”

Maddie gasped. Her lungs felt on fire. Ever since her daughter’s death thirteen Aprils ago, April had been her cruelest month. Now it would be Trish Sullivan’s as well. Elizabeth Devlin Gloucester, Bumper Devlin Sullivan, never cousins in life because of their age difference, now cousins in death. She counted to ten, then counted to ten again. At last, her heart rate moderated and she breathed more easily.

She removed the mouth guard she wore so she would not grind her teeth in her sleep–hundreds of dollars to keep perfect a smile she rarely had occasion to use. She picked up the phone. The dial tone jarred her and she hung up. Trish had not called when Elizabeth died, had not attended her wake or funeral. Bumper’s death tempered Maddie’s grudge, but not the realization that Trish would not welcome her call. The sins of generations past victimized them both, making present day sins unnecessary.

A photo of Avram Levy’s skull-cap replaced Bumper’s picture on the TV screen. Maddie applied her lawyer’s mind to the scant information offered by the report. She rummaged through her bag of defense attorney tricks and treats to make sense of what she had just seen, had just heard. She played these mind games because an ancient litigator whose nose and ears bristled with the hair of experience once told her visualization was the key to being a successful trial lawyer. It worked in her professional life, if not her personal.

Leaking this information–Levy’s name, the photo of the skull-cap–to the press was not the style of the Suffolk County District Attorney. He held his cards so close to the vest the dirt on his hands and fingers smudged his white dress shirt. Mayor Charlie was too calculating to finger Levy before the public had processed the murder of his son and none of his underlings had the balls to do something like this on their own. Jewish votes and Jewish money were essential to Charlie’s U.S. Senate campaign. High-level sources in the police department, the news anchor had said. It had to be the highest, Police Commissioner Dante Ugolino. But, why?

Maddie ticked off potential explanations on her fingers, each a negative. Ugolino wouldn’t do it to scare off the defense bar because the best made their reputations and fortunes winning high-profile unwinnable cases. Nor to calm the community because the disclosure was too inflammatory. Nor to incite anti-Semitism, even though it would. A mistake? Ugolino was too foresighted, too farsighted.

Maddie stopped counting on her fingers as two possible explanations came into focus. Ugolino was laying the foundation for justifying a cursory police investigation of Bumper’s murder. The police had their man, so why bother? Maddie could offer a multitude of reasons why the police should bother–the possibility Levy didn’t act alone being the most obvious, the possibility the skull-cap was a plant by the killer to mislead the police the second most obvious. Or, Ugolino was generating pretrial publicity that would make it impossible to impanel an impartial jury in Boston, sucker-punching the average defense attorney to move for a change of venue.

Maddie had tried cases in rural Massachusetts, Franklin and Berkshire Counties, and Worcester County north of the city. Jews were scarce in those parts of the state. Blue-collar workers, farmers, older people with traditional values and strong bonds to their ethnic communities as well as their churches–older people who had been brought up to believe Jews were responsible for the Crucifixion–filled the jury pools. Those people would focus on the obvious–the skull-cap beside the body–and ignore whatever smoke defense counsel would blow. The case would be decided, the guilty verdict rendered, before the lunch break on the first day of deliberations.

Years of trying cases in the Criminal Session of Suffolk County Superior Court had taught her that Levy needed a Boston jury drawn from a pool large enough to include liberal Democrats, the college educated, a white-collar jury with teachers, engineers, business owners, accountants, people who would listen and assess the evidence rather than be swayed by emotion or prejudice. It only took one, one out of twelve. Her trial experience also made it clear to her that Ugolino had outfoxed the defense bar. He wanted to deep-six a thorough police investigation to force the defense to do the police’s job on the defense’s nickel. He wanted the change of venue and he was doing his best to finesse the defense into requesting it.

But, why? The prosecution’s case must have a weakness. A set of fingerprints that didn’t match Levy’s. A break in the chain of custody. A piece of physical evidence “lost” in the police department evidence room. Or, planted at the crime scene. Ugolino was not beneath corrupting a crime scene, something every experienced defense attorney knew but could never muster sufficient evidence to prove. Too obvious, these weaknesses. Pre-trial discovery would alert defense counsel to them. No, it had to be something so subtle, yet so fatal, only one in a thousand defense lawyers would figure it out. It was the kind of challenge she thrived on and succeeded at more often than not.

Maddie tried to infer what the weakness was. Less than twelve hours had elapsed since Bumper’s murder, since Mayor Charlie had found Bumper’s body. Logic said it had to be tied into something Charlie did before the police arrived, before the police tape cordoning off the crime scene went up. Corrupting the crime scene was one explanation; removing evidence another. With or without consulting Ugolino first? Maddie loved conspiracies. The more implausible, the more she loved them. Her secret vice, alien abductions.

No, as much as this was her kind of case, she wouldn’t represent Levy, if asked. She never represented homicide defendants accused of killing a child or any defendants accused of abusing a child, a preference the director of Suffolk County Legal Services had respected to date when assigning cases.

The camera zoomed in on Avram Levy’s name embroidered in the lining of the skull-cap. The spidery stitching reminded Maddie of the way her ma had embroidered her name in her church dresses. Ma had mothballed those dresses for the granddaughter she yearned for, but Maddie had unpicked the embroidery and donated the dresses to a charity which shipped used clothing to missions in Africa. At the time, Maddie thought seeing her dresses walking down the street would decimate whatever remnant of her fragile psyche had survived Elizabeth’s death; but, now, years later, she regretted acting in such haste. She rolled to her side, her head resting on an arm. Hair covered her cheek. On the television, the newscaster, now perky, moved on to a story about the possible postponement of the Boston Marathon if the heat did not moderate.

Maddie clicked off the television, eased out of bed, and rested her elbows on the window sill. The street was quiet, empty except for the heat waves rising off the pavement. The streetlight opposite her bedroom window hummed softly like a fluorescent light beginning to wear down. It was six in the morning. After Elizabeth’s death, it had taken months, years, for her to reset her internal alarm clock, seven months before she first slept through the night rather than awaken for the 3:00 AM bottle, two years before she slept through it regularly. Habits and routines were another form of grieving; giving them up, a way of letting go. Which was not the same as forgetting. Or forgiving.

 

-2-

 

The phone rang as Maddie washed her breakfast dishes. Half a pink grapefruit. A slice of whole wheat toast, dry. A cup of coffee, black, French Press brewed fresh each morning, coarse ground Kenyan coffee beans, the one luxury she allowed herself. On this morning, she sought solace in a second cup. Since her da had passed, calls before work were rare, usually a solicitation on behalf of a police or fire relief fund where most of the money went to the company raising it and a penny or two trickled down to the widows and children desperate for money. She thought about letting the phone ring, but she had been trained to answer a ringing phone just like dogs had been trained to respond to a bell by that Russian whose name she didn’t remember. In college, she had taken a psychology course to satisfy a science distribution requirement and hated every minute of it. Now, after eight years in the court-room, she knew more about ins and outs of the human mind than Professor Whatever-His-or-Her-Name-Was.

“Maddie,” George Harriman said. “Bumper . . . ”

“I know, Uncle George. I saw it on TV.”

Detective George Harriman. An uncle by affection, not blood, who had always been there for Maddie. Her da’s best friend, their friendship originating in catechism class at St. Dymphna Catholic Church and forged on the beaches of Guadalcanal during World War II, a friendship so strong it survived George’s moving back and forth between the two branches of the estranged Devlin family, an envoy with diplomatic immunity, a friendship which in spite of its strength was unable to reunite what had cleaved asunder two generations before. And, so, he had stopped trying.

“Was Ugolino the high police source?” Maddie asked.

“You should go to Bumper’s wake,” Harriman said.

“Why does he want a change of venue? Did Charlie corrupt the crime scene? Was the skull-cap a plant?”

“Trish needs your help.”

“Ugolino’s as obvious as the fat hanging over his belt.”

“Maddie!” Harriman’s voice had the snap of a frustrated beat cop trying to control an unruly crowd. “Trish needs you.”

“She wasn’t there for me when Elizabeth died. She wasn’t there for me when I asked Charlie to add the Elizabeth Fund to the list of charities city employees could contribute to through a payroll deduction and he told me to go fuck myself. She wasn’t there for me when Ugolino vetoed Boston cops taking the Elizabeth Fund’s course in child abuse prevention and you and the union forced him to approve it. So, why should I be there for her?”

To honor her daughter’s memory, shortly after her death Maddie had founded the Elizabeth Fund, a charity to provide support to victims of child abuse and to educate the public on the problem, a problem that received little or no attention in the press. Michelle Furey, an attorney recommended by a law school classmate of Maddie’s, had donated her services to form a charitable corporation under Massachusetts law and to qualify it as a charity under the Internal Revenue Code so that contributions were tax deductible. Furey had declined an invitation to join the board of directors. Maddie had not believed Furey’s “standard policy” explanation and replaced her as the Fund’s attorney.

“You’ve been through it,” Harriman said.

“What about Father Curry? I’m not her savior.”

“Talk to her. For her sake and yours.”

“I tried. Bumper’s First Communion. I reached out to her. You know what happened.”

Aunt Katie Devlin had happened. Katie had imported the Devlin blood feud from Dublin to Boston and enforced it with the enthusiasm of a nun sowing the fear of God in the minds of impressionable children.

“Maybe,” Maddie said, “if there’s a time Katie’s not there.”

“That’s the same as saying no.”

“It’s the best I can do.”

“No, it’s all you’re willing to do.”

“You have a nice day, too.”

It would serve Trish right, Maddie thought as she dried her breakfast dishes, if I represented Levy. Still, she had made a promise to Elizabeth’s memory, a promise more important to her than payback to Trish’s side of the family.

 

-3-

 

While commuters crawling along the Southeast Expressway listened to radio talk shows whose ratings fluctuated with how inflammatory the hosts and callers were, three men drenched the Passover matzoh offered for sale by a West Roxbury supermarket with pig’s blood. The Boston Superintendent of Schools locked down the high school in Roslindale after fights broke out between Catholic and Jewish students, Catholic and Jewish teachers. Everywhere, people heard footsteps; yet, when they looked over their shoulders they saw only shadows.

Later that morning, Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben, the rabbi of the Chelsea synagogue where Levy davened, absorbed the arrhythmic pulse of the city as he crossed City Hall Plaza. The heat and humidity of the canicular weather gnawed at his knuckles. Although he had no memory of it, Nazi hammers had fractured and re-fractured those knuckles as if they were rocks being split apart. Now they bulged from the back of his hands like cancerous tumors whose cells had never stopped dividing. An amateur boxer who fought several fights too many was his explanation when people asked.

After the war, the rabbi healed himself by cocooning certain of his memories of the Nazi era to create an amnesia so selective that although he did not forget the Nazi era from an historical perspective, he had no memory of his having lived through it, no memory of his personal experiences. These memories did not exist for him, but they had enough of a presence in his subconscious to influence his life. He never married. He did not share the naive belief so common among American clergy, especially rabbis, that a benevolent God would somehow make things right. Nor did he question how God could permit such an evil as Adolf Hitler. For Rabbi ben Reuben, men of unspeakable evil were as much a part of the history of the Jewish people as the Covenant.

Now, the rabbi weaved between the lines of people on City Hall Plaza queued up at the pushcarts offering hot dogs and sauerkraut, gyros and Greek salads, meat pies, and cold soda, pushcarts whose prices for cold drinks rose in lockstep with the temperature. The lunch hour rush had begun, but the knish and latke vendor’s space was vacant. Snatches of conversation curled above the pushcarts. “His blood was drained,” a woman waiting for a gyro said. “I told the wife not to let the kids out of her sight,” a construction worker told the hot dog vendor.

Levy’s call to ben Reuben had come shortly after sunrise in time for the rabbi to turn on the news and hear a phrase he thought he had forever left behind in Europe: blood libel. “It’s not true,” he screamed at the announcer, but she repeated the phrase twice before moving on to a commercial for a breakfast pastry that could be heated in a toaster.

Pain detonated inside the rabbi’s skull. He staggered to his desk and collapsed into the desk chair. Blood libel. Sparks darted along the neural pathways of his brain tracing white lines against the pinkish hue of his brain tissue as shocking as the bolts of lightning discharged from the Van de Graaff generator at Boston’s Museum of Science. The white lines roamed freely until they reached an island of black engulfing the hippocampus, a barrier that dead-ended the neural pathways. The sparks piled up against this barrier like medieval soldiers against a castle wall they could not breach. As suddenly as it appeared, the pain in his skull vanished. A thought lingered in the rabbi’s mind. Something unknown lay dormant within that castle.

Later, in the synagogue, as he and Jacob Moskovitzky waited for a minyan to assemble for Shacharit, the rabbi repeated the words he had screamed at the television announcer. “It’s not true.”

“Not here, not in Europe,” Moskovitzky replied.

Aged and elderly, they gathered each day in the Chelsea shul with other refugees from Nazis or Stalinists, Bolsheviks or Communists, pogroms or inquisitions as virulent and violent as centuries earlier when Spain exiled its civilization. The slander was not true, Moskovitzky and ben Reuben agreed, but they knew it did not have to be true to be “true.” It was the nature of this peculiar and indelible slander against Jews that the truth was in the slandering regardless of the inveterate inaccuracy of what was said. After a long wait for a tenth congregant, the rabbi asked Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh.’s forgiveness and began the service with nine. Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh, the name of God expressed as a tetragrammaton since His name was too sacred to be spoken.

“I will call my grandson,” Moskovitzky said after the benediction. Moskovitzky had founded Boston’s preeminent Jewish law firm, its name sanitized as Mosca, Baruch and Cohen. On his ninetieth birthday, leadership of the firm devolved upon his grandson, Jeffrey Mosca.

“They refuse,” Moskovitzky said after completing the call. “Jeffrey says they are not criminal lawyers.”

“He’s afraid, Jacob. In Europe fear made us brave. Here it makes us cowards.”

“Jews have it too easy in this country,” Moskovitzky said. “We’ve become complacent. Forgetful of history. Our senses cauterized.”

For the remainder of the morning, Moskovitzky continued to seek legal counsel for Levy. Boston’s principal civil liberties firm, Ginsberg, Levin, and Katz, begged off, confessing that they depended on Jewish contributions to balance their budget and they feared those contributions would cease or be substantially reduced. Other firms demanded substantial cash retainers or quoted high hourly rates. One or two admitted they depended on the good will of City Hall to represent their clients effectively. Soliciting contributions to a defense fund failed. Jews who raised millions of dollars for Israel in a morning shunned Levy as if he were traif. The rabbis of wealthy suburban congregations refused to return Moskovitzky’s phone calls.

“In the old country, we were not our own enemy,” Moskovitzky said.

“Who defends the undefended?” The rabbi chewed aspirin to relieve the pain in his joints.

“Suffolk County Legal Services.”

“What do they know of blood libels?”

The rabbi went into the kitchen for water to wash down the aspirin grit coating his tongue. Curling his fingers around a plastic child’s cup with an oversized handle and four large finger notches, he struggled to line it up with the stream of water flowing from the faucet. Water cascaded around his wrist, soaking the cuff of his shirt sleeve. He leaned on the edge of the sink to steady his arm. Slowly, too slowly, the cup filled with water. Cartoon characters decorated this child’s cup, three large dogs with eye patches chasing a puppy holding a bone. As recently as yesterday, these characters had amused him; but on this morning, he could only think that somewhere there must be a cup where the puppy was caught and ripped asunder by the dogs. He raised the cup to his lips and drank, swishing the water around his mouth before swallowing it. The aspirin particles felt like crushed stone sluicing down his throat.

Now, under a midday sun hotter than the wrath of Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh. at the golden calf, Rabbi ben Reuben hobbled across a crowded brick plaza fronting Boston’s city hall that festered with the talk of blood libel. The air was so thick with heat that breathing seared his nasal passages and lungs. The stench of greasy pushcart food, intensified by the heat, made him nauseous.

He wondered whether he had smelled a similar stench before. Where? When? He did not remember. He dismissed the thought as a by-product of the heat, worrying instead that at his age, prone to heat stroke, he might not make it to the other side of the plaza.

He gagged, then dry-heaved, and leaned against the outer wall of the entrance to the Government Center subway station to catch his breath. He sucked on a mint to cleanse the funny taste in his mouth. His mind felt like a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle that had been dumped from its box onto the table, several hundred spilling onto the floor. After several minutes, he pressed on across the plaza.

In the office of Steve Frohling, Director of Suffolk County Legal Services, the rabbi shivered in the draft of the air conditioner. “Sit. Please.”

That was the same invitation the agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had issued to the rabbi when his turn finally came for the interview that would determine whether he would be allowed to enter the United States. Many hours he had waited in a large room which smelled of hundreds of unbathed people, the sweat of his hands staining the paper with the interview number that has been assigned to him. New York. 1946 or 1947. The rabbi did not remember which.

The nameplate on the agent’s desk identified him as Mr. Minzhe and he resembled the waiters in the Chinese restaurant across the street from the docks in London. The rabbi did not eat in that restaurant even though he was hungry because neither the food nor the kitchen was kosher. On the boat, during the long ocean voyage, he had no choice but to eat. To absolve himself, the rabbi invoked the doctrine of Pikuach Nefesh, the principle in Jewish law that the preservation of human life overrides the restrictions of Kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws mandating what observant Jews could and could not eat. Perhaps, he would have survived the voyage without eating, but he had heard the INS turned away people who were sick. In his mind, Pikuac Nefesh applied.

“The early 1930’s,” he had replied when Mr. Minzhe asked him when he had been ordained as a rabbi. “I came to the rabbinate later in life than most.”

“And then?” Minzhe had asked.

“Now, I am here?”

“From then to now?”

The rabbi paused. “I don’t remember.”

Minzhe eyed him with the look of a judge being told by a recidivist that he would not do it again if given probation rather than a jail sentence. “Recite the Shema,” he said.

“The Shema? You know this prayer?”

“It was drilled into my head in Hebrew school.”

Because of Minzhe’s sallow skin tone and Chinese features, the rabbi assumed he was not Jewish. The rabbi knew the presence of Jews in China had been documented as early as the seventh or eighth centuries. He knew the history of the Jewish community in Kaifeng in the Henan province, a Chinese community that practiced Judaism. But, he had never met nor seen photos of any Chinese Jews. To him, they were as exotic as the black Jews of Ethiopia.

After the rabbi finished, Minzhe said, “Now, the Amidah.”

Again, the rabbi did so.

“The blessing before and after reading the Haftarah.”

“You know this blessing?” the rabbi asked.

“You fake it at your own peril,” Minzhe said. After the rabbi complied, Minzhe conceded he was a rabbi. “Normally, your memory gap would disqualify you from entry into the United States, but I will use a generic description of a typical Jewish experience during the Nazi era to answer the personal history question.”

“You will make up my history?” the rabbi asked.

“If I don’t, you’re on the next boat back to Europe.”

Using carbon paper, Minzhe made a simultaneous copy of the statement he entered on the rabbi’s immigration form and gave the copy to the rabbi to memorize in the event the INS called him in for further questioning. “Welcome to the United States.” Minzhe stood and offered his hand in friendship.

Now, accounting sheets covered Frohling’s desk, sickly yellow, sickly green, many stained with brown coffee rings. Numbers filled the columns, some written over, others blemished by erasures made by dirty erasers. “Next year’s budget,” Frohling said. “Every dollar has to do the work of twenty.” In the fluorescent light, Frohling’s skin was sickly and slack.

Frohling listened between bites of prune Danish and slurps of coffee as the rabbi explained Levy’s predicament. Crumbs gathered on the bulge of his stomach. He gulped the last of his coffee and pushed the final bite of Danish into his mouth, then brushed the crumbs away, crushed his cup, and balled the wax paper from his Danish, tossing both into the waste basket. “I thought you people took care of your own.”

Rabbi ben Reuben squirmed in his chair.

Frohling continued, “We don’t get many Jewish lawyers here. They’re too clever and amscray as soon as they figure out the way to the court-house. The one we got now, Larry Gingold, we’re his last resort. B & E, A & B, larceny under, fine; but a capital case, never.” He tapped a cigarette against his thumb nail, then lit it. Its tip glowed with each inhale. Each exhale looked like a plume of smoke from a chimney. “Levy’s little hat under the chair, you don’t need a law degree to know how damning that piece of evidence is.”

“I apologize for wasting your time.”

“We’re prisoners of the law here, obliged to represent indigent defendants. All indigent defendants. No picking, no choosing. If Pol Pot walked through that door and proved he was penniless, we’d have to defend him.”

“Pol Pot?”

“Cambodia’s Hitler.” Frohling tapped the ash off his cigarette. “I know the perfect attorney for Levy,” he continued, “someone here who has a better than even chance getting him off, the best defense attorney in the city, public or private. Maddie Devlin. Bad news is, she won’t defend him. She’s as Irish as green beer on St. Paddy’s Day and comes with more baggage than all the skycaps at Logan.”

Devlin, the rabbi said to himself. Maddie Devlin. A spark of recognition smoldered in his memory. Several years ago, he recalled, she contacted him to solicit a contribution from his congregation to a charity she had founded to provide support to victims of child abuse. The Elizabeth Fund. “We are a poor congregation,” he had told her, “but I will mention it at Friday night services.” That was his standard reply to solicitations from outside the Jewish community. He didn’t remember whether the congregation made a contribution to the Elizabeth Fund and, if it did, how much.

Frohling blew smoke rings at the air conditioner. In the rush of frigid air, they twisted and turned and tore apart. “A man in your line of work must have a pretty good read on human nature. What are your top five motivators, the five things that really make people tick tock? Maddie brings two of them to Levy’s defense. First, hatred, or more precisely, its stepsister, revenge; second, greed.” He leaned across his desk. “Bumper Sullivan’s mother’s a Devlin. There’s a blood feud between the two sides of the family what goes back to the old country. Getting Levy off would wreak a lot of revenge for her. As for greed, she’s been lusting for a break-out case since the day she got here, something to rescue her from the poverty of legal aid. Sounds good, you say? Not so fast. She never defends anyone whose victim’s a kid because once upon a time her kid was the victim and her ex-husband walked when his attorney out-lawyered the prosecution.”

Frohling brushed a cigarette ash from the budget papers. “And she’s got a chip on her shoulder bigger than an Egyptian pyramid. She thinks she’s been blackballed by Boston’s white-shoe law firms ’cause she’s a woman, Irish, divorced. Truth is they won’t go near her ’cause they think she’s a bit touched.” He tapped the side of his head with his finger. “Unhinged. They’re afraid she’ll drop off the deep end any time.”

“You’re not?”

“I am, big time; but here we take what we can get and thank God for it.”

The rabbi bit his tongue as pain radiated from his knuckles throughout his hands. “You would ask her?”

“We’d be collateral damage. I fight for every paper clip and, Constitution be damned, I never have the money to defend as zealously as possible everyone entitled to free legal counsel. If Levy’s indigent, I’m stuck, even if it means blowing the whole year’s budget on one case. And next year come budget time Beacon Hill will punish us big time. Fifty cents on the dollar if we’re lucky. One thin dime if we’re not.”

The rabbi gazed at the water tank on the roof of the adjacent building. Its copper sheathing, once shiny, was crusted with the turquoise of age. He had, he realized, as much free will as that copper sheathing had in choosing whether to be oxidized or not.

Talk of Avram Levy and Bumper Sullivan still suppurated from the bricks of City Hall Plaza, but the lines at the pushcarts were shorter and the rabbi’s passage through the stench faster. “Hey, mister,” they gyro vendor shouted. “The lamb she is tender.” The rabbi quickened his step. There was a vague familiarity to the wisps of smoke rising from the charcoal, but he couldn’t place it.

 

-4-

 

Maddie Devlin joined Suffolk County Legal Services after graduating law school. Eight years later, it had become a sinkhole, swallowing her whole, then closing over her, fossilizing her, bringing her to the edge of petrifaction. The sinkhole opened the week she was sworn in as a member of the bar, the reward for winning her first case, a verdict of Not Delinquent for a juvenile charged with B & E. Flustered at finding him under the bed in the master bedroom, the arresting officer forgot to Miranda him. Three years later, Maddie plea-bargained that juvenile, now an adult, down from kidnapping to unlawful restraint, ten years to three, eighteen months to be served, eighteen months suspended. Over the years, he became one of her steadiest clients until a judge who actually read the pre-sentence report brushed aside her argument of mitigating circumstances, a broken home, an abuse victim as a child, a below-average IQ, and sentenced him to twenty years, ten to be served before being eligible for parole, for aggravated assault and armed robbery. One less file on her desk, one less predator on the streets of Boston.

After winning her first capital case by attacking the scientific validity of the fingerprint evidence, Maddie submitted résumés to Boston’s Mayflower law firms which years earlier had awakened to the fact that defending people charged with white-collar crimes such as stock fraud, tax evasion, criminal antitrust violations, currency manipulation, and other business misdeeds was lucrative and did not besmirch their images. We don’t handle homicides, one human resources director told her. Two years later when one of her murder cases rated thirty seconds on the evening news, she sent out another set of résumés. Four firms invited her for interviews; one offered her a job, indexing depositions and document discovery in complex civil litigation cases, a dead end that at best would relegate her to staff attorney status, a permanent associate never to be elevated to a partnership, never to see the inside of a court-room. Preferring to try cases, she remained with legal aid.

Boston Municipal Court one day, Roxbury District Court the next, she toured the courts of Suffolk County like a hamster running on a treadmill: Dorchester District Court, Boston Juvenile Court, South Boston District Court, West Roxbury District Court, Charlestown District Court, East Boston District Court, Brighton District Court, and occasionally courts in Middlesex and Norfolk Counties, now and then one or two in Essex. She visited them all, some more than once, in the course of a routine month.

To an employment lawyer who specialized in employee discrimination cases, Maddie railed against Boston’s hidebound legal community for discriminating against her for being Irish, female, and divorced, not the profile of the type of women attorneys these firms preferred to display. When she demanded the employment lawyer file a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claiming discrimination based on gender and national origin, the lawyer had advised her it would be impossible to prove a case even with the lower burden of proof required in civil law suits. The evidence is too circumstantial, the lawyer explained. There’s no smoking gun. Maddie knew the lawyer was right.

“The power of visualization is the key to success,” advised a mentor and visualize Maddie did. First, her case on the front-page of The New York Times; then on the network news. She visualized herself surrounded by a horde of cameras, mobs of reporters competing for her every word. She saw herself in a corner office on a high floor in one of Boston’s office towers earning a high-six-figure salary, picking and choosing clients, the way she picked and chose a pearl necklace or diamond choker during one of her many imaginary shopping sprees at Tiffany and Company. She visualized while waiting in court for her cases to be called, while working out, while on the subway when she tired of the book she was reading, at home waiting for her dinner to heat or in a restaurant waiting for it to be served, while stuck on the Central Artery during rush hour, in the theater, at the ballet, on dates with men for whom she was one or two rungs higher on society’s ladder, in the bleachers of Fenway Park or the nosebleed seats at Boston Garden, whenever, wherever, her mind drifted; but for all her visualizations she still wallowed in the depths of her private sinkhole defending people whose names she banished from her memory before the court-room door closed behind her.

Instead, she numbed her pain by transferring it to the victims of her clients, people she also quickly forgot. The shopkeeper whose store was robbed was a blank face in a white apron. The rape victim was a statistic, a rape kit, a lab test, a woman who should have known better than to be where she was when she was with whom she was. Widows were women dressed in black, widowers men in black suits. Winning cases, freeing the guilty, salved her conscience, her dark secret never talked about. To anyone who asked why she did not become a prosecutor after her ex-husband’s acquittal of homicide in connection with the death of their daughter, Elizabeth, she offered well-rehearsed cant about Powell v. Alabama and Gideon v. Wainwright and the right to legal counsel. She wore her nobility the way a leper wore his skin and felt equally isolated, quarantined, diseased.

To assuage her guilt and to honor her daughter’s memory, Maddie devoted herself to the Elizabeth Fund. She personally visited every church and synagogue in greater Boston soliciting either donations or for them to sponsor fund-raisers. One of the mental health professionals she occasionally used as an expert witness in her criminal cases designed a short one-session course to educate the law enforcement community. With George Harriman’s help, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, over Mayor Charlie’s opposition, forced Chief Ugolino to mandate it as part of its neighborhood policing program. This created a cascading effect as more and more police departments in the greater Boston area included it as part of their training. A law school classmate whose father was president of the Massachusetts Bar Association arranged for the MBA to add the seminar to its continuing legal education curriculum. At the urging of the Chief Justice of the Boston Municipal Court who presided over child abuse cases with a depressing regularity, the Massachusetts Judicial Conference offered the seminar as part of its training program for new judges. For sitting judges, it was optional. After several visits and much nagging, the United Fund of Boston added the Elizabeth Fund to its list of approved charities and provided small annual grants.

Yet, for all the personal satisfaction the Elizabeth Fund provided her, for all the contacts she made, for all the praise she received, for reasons Maddie did not understand, she could not escape Suffolk County Legal Services. Once a leper, she told herself, always a leper.

She led a bifurcated life, defending the scum of the earth in court, defending the most vulnerable victims of that scum outside of court. She had little time for a social life. Her occasional dates provided no emotional satisfaction and little physical gratification. When she needed to relax, to unwind, she drank a Guinness and used a vibrator she had mail-ordered from a store in New York City that specialized in sex toys. It was a life, not the worst of all possible lives, but also not the life she had anticipated. She did not have a Panglossian view of the world.

Now, the office door had not closed behind her when Carmelita Delgado, receptionist and fetcher of Frohling’s daily prune Danish and coffee, told her the boss had been screaming for her all morning and she better have a damn good explanation for being so late. Maddie barged into Frohling’s office.

“Remind me, Maddie, what a closed door means.”

“I just did.”

“I need you to cover an arraignment. Judge Spodapoulos. Third Session. Two fifteen.”

“One of the third-years can handle it.”

“Avram Levy. His rabbi came to see me this morning.”

“It’s a frame. The skull-cap’s a plant.”

“How so?”

“It’s the only logical explanation for Ugolino’s TV special.”

“If he’s innocent, defending him won’t violate your golden rule.” Frohling tapped his watch. “Spodapoulos won’t wait. He’ll appoint someone else. Maybe that piece of shit Ed Hornstein.” Frohling shifted his attention to a file on his desk, thumbing through the papers with the interest of a schoolboy being forced to conjugate Latin verbs. He knew mentioning that name, Hornstein, would keep Maddie under his thumb.

“Drink after work?” Frohling asked.

“Fuck you.”

“Your place or mine?”

Running to the Old Court-House, Maddie dodged cabs, busses, bike couriers, and the tourist trolley. Pedestrians she ran over. Frohling being Frohling, she thought. He acted that way toward everyone in the office, men and women alike; but his pathetic efforts at seduction were laughed at, spit upon, too comical, too inane, to warrant a sexual harassment complaint. As she crossed Tremont Street and jumped the steps two at a time between One Beacon and Center Plaza, half-moons of sweat accumulated under her arms and stained the front of her blouse. Hotter than hell, someone complained, and she laughed. Hell, the nuns had preached, was a dry heat.

 

-5-

 

The lobby of the Old Court-House in Boston’s Pemberton Square ascended four stories from a ground-level floor littered with cigarette butts, candy wrappers, cardboard coffee cups, half-eaten sandwiches whose bread was as stale as the excuses offered by defendants to judges who had heard it all already, and tissues soggy with the tears of mothers, wives, or children as their sons, husbands, fathers were led away in handcuffs to the Charles Street Jail or one of the many houses of correction or state prisons maintained by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the betterment of its misbehaving citizens. Arching over the lobby floor at a height of four stories was a domed ceiling caked with more than one hundred years of the blighted hopes and betrayed illusions of people having business before the courts of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. At one time, when the wall between Church and State was neither high nor solid, domes had been a popular architectural feature of court-houses, a feature borrowed from churches in the expectation the resemblance between church and court-house would lead people to believe when they stood before the judge they were standing before God. Experienced trial attorneys knew better.

Cavernous and dimly lit, the lobby was like the central chamber of an uncharted cave inhabited by creatures of the dark: attorneys, shape-shifters camouflaged into invisibility nodding with feigned sincerity, and clients, creeping and crawling across its floor like moles searching for grubs, the luciferous glow of their anger lighting the way, clients squat with hairy faces, lupine eyes, and venomous voices snarling with bravado.

Waiting for an elevator, Attorney Maddie Devlin sipped grapefruit juice purchased at the food concession operated by the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. Its acidic tartness matched her mood. She centered herself between the four elevators, two on each side of the lobby, so she could run to the first that arrived. According to court-house myth, the elderly operators came with the elevators as an accessory installed by the manufacturer. Maddie respected court-house myths no matter how silly and greeted the operators upon entry, thanked them upon exiting. They, in turn, never closed the door in her face. In obeisance to another myth, she always skipped over the brass engravings set in the brick plaza outside the building as if they were cracks in the sidewalk, one plaque commemorating each of the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. According to the myth, an attorney who trampled the Bill of Rights would lose his case. Someday she’d put it to scientific proof.

“May your Irish eyes always smile, Maddie.”

“Top of the afternoon to you, C. J.”

Claudius J. Antenor, Esq., C. J. Ant to bar and bench alike, chewed on an unlit cigar that accented the roundness of his face the way a curlicue turns an O into a Q. He had a fisherman’s face, sun dark and lined with an ocean of wrinkles; yet his hands were smooth and soft like the hands of a male model who appeared in magazine ads for Swiss watches or Italian leather gloves.

Maddie had interned for C. J. Ant the summer after her second year of law school, attracted by the opportunity of hands-on legal experience and the chance to see how the law functioned outside the classroom. During that internship, she had plea-bargained Jim Ed Wallaca–one of the few out of the scores of names, the scores of cases, she remembered because he was the first case C. J. Ant allowed her to present to the court herself–out of a prison sentence and into the Marines and Vietnam; yet what had become of him she neither knew nor cared. Without this obdurate armor she would be as vulnerable as a crustacean without its shell.

C. J. Ant specialized in defending snatch-and-grabbers, street hookers, bookies and their runners, low-level mob enforcers who were not “made” men, drunks, disorderlies, and petty criminals picked up at the arraignment session or assigned to him by judges he knew from law school. At summer’s end, C. J. Ant put Maddie on the payroll paying her enough to cover her third-year tuition and retire some of her student loans. When she graduated, C. J. Ant offered her a job; but she declined, accepting a position with legal aid because she naively believed it would provide a better chance for professional growth. Now, years later, ensnared at legal aid, cancerous was the way she described that growth.

“What brings you to paradise?” Maddie asked.

“To watch my favorite protégé in action.”

C. J. Ant stepped aside to let Maddie enter the elevator. She smiled at Lorenzo, the elderly operator, who usually replied with a cheery buon giorno but this time lowered his eyes as if he was avoiding looking at something so sinful to see it would turn him to stone. Maddie opened her mouth, but closed it when C. J. Ant shook his head. The elevator lurched upward. The cable groaned. The fluorescent fixture buzzed. Residue from the stink of C. J. Ant’s cigars scented the air. Lorenzo stared at his hands.

“Someone tipped Hornstein,” C. J. Ant said. “He tipped the world.”

“Fucking Frohling.”

Maddie leaned against the back wall of the elevator. If she were superstitious, she would consider Hornstein an omen, but she didn’t believe in omens. No, Hornstein wasn’t a sign from God or the work of Satan. He was a pain in the ass, insincere, greedy, so self-righteous he sputtered outrage at attorney jokes. If he were a car, he’d be a VW bug with a Rolls-Royce grill, a Chevrolet Corvair with a rear spoiler, a Ford Pinto with a Mustang scoop in the hood; but he wasn’t a car, he was an asshole who bartered her ex-husband’s legal fees for race track tips and maintained his active status as a lawyer only to preserve the prestige of being an esquire.

“For shame, Maddie. For shame.” Joe Daley, the court officer assigned to the court-room of Judge Alexander Spodapoulos, held the door for her. A veteran of the Korean War, he was slim enough to wear his Marine uniform on Veterans Day and fit enough to still answer his country’s call. He was always kinder to her than he had to be and she reciprocated with a small gift at Christmas–a tin of his favorite pipe tobacco–until the Commission on Judicial Corruption promulgated a rule banning attorneys from giving gifts to judges, court officers, and employees in the offices of the Clerks of Court. Now, Daley looked at her with the eyes of a person mourning the death of a close friend.

Maddie sank into a chair at the defense counsel table. C. J. Ant sat directly behind her on the first bench outside the bar enclosure. She had outgrown her mentor, but his presence comforted her. She jotted the date and name of the judge on the top line of her legal pad, the name of the case and docket number on the second line. She had handled so many arraignments she could do them in her sleep: Waive the reading of the charges. Enter a plea of not guilty. Request Suffolk County Legal Services be appointed. The judge would ask if she wanted to schedule a bail hearing and she would select a date which allowed sufficient time to prepare. Five minutes, maybe fewer, and her client would not have to say a word. She scribbled some numbers on her legal pad. For those few minutes, she would accrue fifteen cents of her weekly salary. Private counsel would charge $100.00 and not handle it as well. She ripped the page off her pad and crushed it into a ball.

Four court officers, double the usual complement, positioned themselves on either side of the door. They wore their guns outside their jackets. As people entered single file, one searched their brief-cases and handbags while a second frisked them. The other two were as attentive to their surroundings as Secret Service agents guarding the president. The level of security surprised Maddie. Since the court-house bombings a few years earlier, a metal detector had been installed at the entrance to the building. Everyone emptied their pockets and passed through it. She had herself. An X-ray machine more sensitive than those used at airports scanned bags, pocket books, and brief-cases.

The hands of the court officers rested lightly on the butts of their guns. Their fingers twitched. Maddie sensed they would rather administer justice themselves than leave it in the hands of the judicial system and attorneys like her. She nodded greetings to members of the defense bar as well as prosecutors she had tried cases against. Some nodded back; most looked away. A few mouthed obscenities. To her dismay, Levy’s arraignment had become a busman’s holiday. Hornstein cleared security and sat beside C. J. Ant. She smelled his lunch on his breath, a tuna fish sandwich and dill pickle. She squared her shoulders and straightened her back and pressed her knees together, posture that would have made the nuns of her childhood proud.

The door to the holding cell opened and Levy entered flanked by court officers. He looked soft and pudgy as if he had not shed his baby fat. At Walpole he’d be another bitch to be fought over by the gangs who controlled the cell blocks. His hands were cuffed and anchored by chains to a steel belt which girded his waist. Ankle cuffs connected his feet, the chain so short he could not climb into the prisoner’s dock without leaning on someone as he stepped up. Across the court-room, Maddie could not read his mood, perhaps equal parts fear and fascination, the reaction of most first-timers, her preference to the icy contempt of recidivists. She searched his body language, the slumping head, the sagging shoulders, the fidgeting fingers, for clues of guilt or innocence; but she saw neither. Ciphers made the worst clients.

The session clerk, Vilda Mikus, entered from the judge’s chambers followed by the judge. Weeks from mandatory retirement on his 70th birthday, Spodapoulos was marking time in the arraignment session. His eyes twinkled with the light at the end of the tunnel. Soon, the only judging he would be doing was the amount of break on his putts or which fly to cast. After Mikus entreated God to save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the arraignment proceeded like every other until the question of appointing legal counsel. Spodapoulos accepted Probation’s determination of Levy’s indigence, then said, “I assume, Attorney Devlin, Suffolk County Legal Services will appear for him.”

“We will, Your Honor.”

“May I be heard?” Ed Hornstein stepped inside the bar. Sweat moistened the back of his neck and darkened the collar of his shirt. A moustache of sweat glazed the skin above his upper lip. “Edward Hornstein, Judge. My firm Hornstein and Shapiro will represent Mr. Levy pro bono. Ms. Devlin has a conflict of interest. She’s Beatrice Sullivan’s cousin.”

“We are second cousins, Your Honor. Our grandfathers were brothers.” Over the whispers that sissed through the court-room, Maddie continued, “It is well known in the Irish community that there is an ongoing civil war between Mrs. Sullivan’s side of the Devlin family and my side which goes back two generations to certain events that occurred in Dublin in connection with the Easter Rising against the British. If you were to ask Mrs. Sullivan, I am confident she would say my involvement in this case is only the latest battle in this war and that I would work twice as hard on Mr. Levy’s behalf than if the victim were not her son.”

“So, Ms. Devlin,” Judge Spodapoulos said, “your aver there is no conflict of interest.”

“Correct, Your Honor. I would add that Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben, who is the rabbi at Mr. Levy’s synagogue, requested SCLS represent Mr. Levy. If Rabbi ben Reuben feels Mr. Levy’s interests are not being served, he can engage private counsel and SCLS will withdraw. As for Mr. Hornstein, he’s not one-tenth the attorney I am.”

“Does this rabbi know of your relationship with the mayor and his wife?” the judge asked.

“No, Your Honor, but if the rabbi objects, I will recuse myself and Mr. Frohling can assign someone else.”

“Have you spoken to this rabbi?” Spodapoulos asked Hornstein.

“I volunteered my services to Attorney Jacob Moskovitzky who is assisting him.”

“This is just an arraignment,” Spodapoulos said. “I will appoint SCLS to represent Mr. Levy. If Mr. Frohling assigns this case to you, Ms. Devlin, I will require Mr. Levy to file his written consent with the court; otherwise, I will disqualify you in favor of another SCLS attorney.” Spodapoulos scribbled an entry on the case file. “I assume you will enter a plea of not guilty, Ms. Devlin.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Hornstein objected. “Mr. Levy lacks the capacity to make this decision without independent legal advice.”

“You represented to the court Mr. Levy has the assistance of Attorney Jacob Moskovitzky.” The judge turned to Levy. “Is that correct, Mr. Levy?”

Hornstein interrupted. “Attorney Moskovitzky is impaired by age.”

“Mr. Levy?” Spodapoulos said. “Do you wish to be heard?”

Levy’s chains jangled. His expression darkened to one Maddie easily read because she had seen it so often. He wanted to say something, but had been instructed not to, an important piece of information no one had shared with her. His squint, his sneer, told her he didn’t want her to represent him. It was as obvious as the locks of hair covering the sideburns on either side of his face. She glanced at the judge who had either ignored or missed the cues.

“Mr. Levy?” Spodapoulos repeated.

Levy paused, then said, “Rabbi ben Reuben knows best.”

“The hearing on defendant’s application for bail will be Friday next at 10 a.m.” Spodapoulos rapped his gavel. “This matter stands adjourned.”

Court officers escorted Levy to the holding cell. In the hall outside the court-room, reporters scrummed for position. Maddie slipped her notepad into her brief-case.

“Sneak us out the back way,” C. J. Ant said to Joe Daley who hesitated. “Please.”

“For you,” Daley replied.

 

-6-

 

Frohling had just opened his mouth to eat another prune Danish when Maddie burst into his office with the single-mindedness of a cop kicking in the door of a drug-house raid. “Thanks for the heads up to Hornstein,” she said. Anger imprisoned in court-room decorum now animated her. “It was my ex-husband’s trial all over again.”

In her mind’s eye, she visualized herself smashing the prune Danish across Frohling’s face, laughing as he scraped the gooey frosting off his lips, nose, and cheeks. Impacted rage, Maddie’s therapist had once told her, it’s your full-time job. It’s a colloquial name, the therapist had explained, for a manifestation of a psychiatric disorder classified as Intermittent Explosive Disorder. At its worst, a person with IED was the equivalent of an EF-5 tornado in human form.

Three incidents within a month of Elizabeth’s death had landed Maddie on the therapist’s couch. The first occurred after Maddie had bought an ice cream cone, frozen pudding. Eating it as she walked, she stubbed her toe on uneven pavement and momentarily lost her balance, dropping the ice cream from the cone. Crushing the cone in her fist, she threw it at the nearest parking meter; then, screamed uncontrollably at the lump of ice cream on the sidewalk, hurling every curse word she knew at it as if she herself were sprawled on the pavement, the victim of a purse-snatcher who had kicked her legs out from under her as he grabbed her pocketbook.

The second occurred a few days later. Frohling had complimented her blouse, but said she would look a lot better if she undid a button or two. Swearing, she had grabbed a scissors off his desk and cut off his necktie just below the knot. Frohling had managed to swat it from her hand before she was ab le to shred his shirt.

The third occurred in court the next day. Arguing against her motion to suppress evidence in an assault and battery case, the prosecutor did not address the merits of her position but rather launched an ad hominem attack, accusing her of misstating the facts to intentionally mislead the court. Maddie swept the prosecutor’s file off the table and kicked his papers across the floor of the bar enclosure. The judge called her and her alone into chambers, assuring the prosecutor that the assault and battery case would not be the subject of their conversation. In chambers, the judge told Maddie he was familiar with her behavior because his son also had explosive incidents of rage, often accompanied by some form of violence, after returning from combat in Vietnam. The judge recommended a therapist, Dr. Vernon Przystas, who had helped his son control his rage. Either that, the judge said, or a criminal contempt and thirty days to be served.

In appearance, Dr. Przystas had dressed like a clerk in a Robert Hall store, a chain of off-the-rack stores that sold inexpensive men’s dress clothes, one of the Boston outlets being the store her father had bought his one and only suit, his one and only sport jacket and dress slacks, his two white dress shirts, his two ties. Maddie was reassured by Przystas’s rumpled look. A man wearing expensive tailored suits would have intimidated her. Being several weeks overdue for a haircut contributed to his ordinariness. As nervous as she was about seeing a therapist, Maddie sensed his coming at her with an attitude of superiority would not be an issue.

At their first session, Dr. Przystas explained to her that impacted rage, unlike healthy anger, had a disintegrative effect on physical and mental health. The rage itself and the energy needed to suppress it transformed the body into a pressure cooker with a faulty relief valve. Sooner or later an explosion was inevitable. The strain on the body manifested itself in a variety of ways. In the cardio-vascular system, for example, it aggravated the buildup of fatty plaque in the arteries, damaging the arterial walls. The therapist quoted statistics that people with impacted rage are more likely to die of heart attacks or strokes and at a younger age than people without. Among military veterans who have seen combat, impacted rage, at times with intense guilt, at times without, often resulted in anti-social and self-destructive behavior. Her colleagues at Suffolk County Legal Services had defended a handful of Vietnam veterans with that problem, but Maddie had not.

When Maddie heard the diagnosis, she felt she had been given a death sentence. Don’t be so dramatic, Dr. Przystas said. He prescribed Cognitive Relaxation and Coping Skills Therapy or CRCST, both in group and individual settings. CRCST, he explained, was a sequence of twelve or more sessions, some patients needing more sessions than others, beginning with relaxation training, followed by cognitive restructuring, then exposure therapy, concluding with sessions on resisting aggressive impulses and other preventative measures. He favored talk therapy over regimens of psychotropic medications because the drugs had shown limited success.

Maddie soon became an expert on relaxation mechanisms, her favorites being imagining a relaxing experience like listening to Irish folk music while lying in a hammock or counting backward from 100 to whatever number necessary for her anger to dissipate. Her record, as best as she could remember, was somewhere in the seventies. Cognitive restructuring was like a tug-a-war in her psyche between reminding herself that her rage would not make her feel better but would often make her feel worse and her rage boiling over. Logic, persuading herself she was not life’s victim, only worked before rage engulfed her as rage often rendered logic illogical. The lawyer in her, her rational side, told her impacted rage was a problem and that if she tried hard enough she would eventually solve it. Dr. Przystas cautioned that the frustration of not finding a solution often exacerbated the problem. All-or-nothing thinking, he warned, was one of impacted rage’s best allies. Controlling it will always be a struggle; but if you are disciplined about following the prevention protocols, it should ameliorate over time, he added.

For Maddie, the Elizabeth Fund was the first step toward controlling it. Concentrating on the needs of the Fund was one of the most effective ways to reorient her mind away from the ordinary bumps and brises of life that triggered her rage. Still, she did not know how long she could keep going without finding the second step.

Now, counting backward to 85 while also taking cleansing breaths, she calmed herself. Why waste a good Danish, she thought, pinching a piece of it and popping it into her mouth. Humor, especially if she made herself the butt of the joke, was another coping mechanism for impacted rage.

“I needed you for the arraignment,” Frohling said. “I figured a hand-off to Almeida or Southworth.”

“Together they’re not worth half me. If there’s a hole in the case, they’ll never find it. How do I get in touch with Levy’s rabbi?”

“In the flap of my blotter. The rabbi’s card.”

Returning to her office, Maddie phoned Rabbi ben Reuben to request a meeting. As soon as possible, she insisted. Reluctantly because soon it would be the Sabbath and business was not to be transacted on the Sabbath, he agreed to see her after Friday evening services. There were exceptions, he explained, and with Talmudic precision he had found one. Minutes later, the intercom on Maddie’s phone buzzed.

“Attorney Michelle Furey, line one,” Carmelita Delgado said.

“I’ll call back Monday.”

“She says it’s urgent.”

“What’s urgent is that I get out of here.” Maddie punched the button for line 1. After a few seconds of dead air, Attorney Furey said, “Maddie, how’re you doing? How’s the Elizabeth Fund?”

Furey’s voice was as Maddie remembered it, throaty, not a purr, more a growl, a creepy-crawly voice, titillative, a voice that gave Maddie the cold creeps, as if she had thrust her hand into a bucket of ice water, yet a voice that was alluring, like an artificial fly to a trout or a bird call to a wild turkey. Fearing the lure of that voice, Maddie had limited her contact with Furey after the incorporation of the Elizabeth Fund to small-talk at continuing legal education seminars. Since their law practices had minimal overlap, they rarely attended the same seminars.

Maddie remembered saying the first time she met Furey, “Interesting name, Michelle Furey.”

“My dad wanted to name me Molly, but my mom put her foot down so they compromised on Michelle.”

“You sound like a Molly.” Not a Molly, Maddie thought at the time, but the Molly.

“Up and down,” Maddie now said in reply to Furey’s question about the Elizabeth Fund. “Always too many victims. Never enough money. A lot of the bench is still in the dark ages.”

“Sorry to hear that. I called because I represent the Estate of Father Gabriel Finn. He has left you a bequest. We’re reading his will in my office tomorrow morning.”

Maddie wedged the phone between her jaw and shoulder and rubbed her forearms. She hoped her reaction to Furey’s voice was nothing more than a touch of paresthesia explainable by tension, pressure, stress. Slowly, her flesh absorbed her goose bumps.

“Who’s Father Gabriel Finn,” Maddie asked, “and why would he leave me a bequest?”

“Father Bartell Darcy, a colleague of Father Gabriel, has come from Dublin with both the will and the bequest and he’ll explain all.” Maddie felt Furey’s voice in her bones.

“Courier me the paperwork. C.O.D.”

“He says it’s essential you be present.”

“Or what?”

“Or you forfeit the bequest. Not you alone but the other Boston heirs. The will is very explicit. You must all be present. If anyone is absent, everyone forfeits.”

“And those who attend will sue those who don’t.”

“That would be my conjecture.”

Curiosity compelled Maddie, not curiosity about the will or the identity of Father Gabriel, but curiosity about the woman behind the voice on the phone. Her curiosity first surfaced when they worked together on the creation of the Elizabeth Fund. Maddie had suppressed her curiosity over the years. In her stronger moments, she wondered how that voice would play out in a court-room. Would it mesmerize the judge, the jury, or so alienate them they would rule against her every motion or objection, find against her every client? Maddie voted for “mesmerize.” In her weaker moments, she wondered how that voice would play out in the bedroom. She doubted it would be as off-putting as her own voice. Again, Maddie voted for “mesmerize.”

“Still at the same address?” Maddie asked.

“Same address.”

“I have a full day tomorrow so it better be a short will.”

“Only one article relates to the Boston bequest. That’s the only one to be read unless someone insists on the boilerplate.”

On the way to the synagogue in Chelsea, Maddie felt her impacted rage boiling up within her at being commanded to attend a meeting she did not want to attend. This was a classic example of a trivial event causing a reaction grossly disproportionate to the triviality of the event itself. Maddie felt a tightening in her chest, a twitching in her forearms, the type of bodily symptoms Dr. Przystas had told her often accompanied impacted rage. To battle it, to bottle it up, she distracted herself by wondering what did a Molly sound like? What did the Molly sound like? Did Joyce have a woman’s voice in mind, a particular woman’s voice, when he wrote his famous stream of woman’s consciousness soliloquy? His wife’s, Nora’s, she assumed.

It had been a while since her impacted rage had threatened to flare so explosively, but things had piled up on her like stones on a grave: the incessant heat, Hornstein, being treated as if she had gone orange on St. Patrick’s Day, Molly Michelle demanding she show up for the reading of a will. Everything in combination had split her atoms. She felt better for imagining the sound of the Molly’s voice reading James Joyce’s stream-of-conscious soliloquy. The more she imagined, the more it sounded like Michelle Furey’s voice and the more it restored her self-control.

 

-7-

 

In the synagogue’s sanctuary, the evening service for the Sabbath had concluded and Rabbi ben Reuben had wished Shabbat Shalom to each member of the minyan. Because of Levy’s absence, he had had to telephone several people to get the tenth man. Exhausted from the heat, he rested in the front pew.

“That attorney, she is here?” Moskovitzky asked.

“In my study.”

Moskovitzky held out his hand to help the rabbi stand.

“Do you think he did it, Jacob?”

“He’s such a tsadek, such a nebbish.”

“Such an akytor, maybe. What do we really know of him? A few biographical facts? And we don’t even know if those are true. We just assume they are.”

Moskovitzky pondered the question as if it were a Talmudic enigma. “Why? Why would he?”

“For him, Masada, not the Wailing Wall, is the holiest place in Israel,” Rabbi ben Reuben said. “He has all seven volumes of Josephus’s The Jewish War, both in English and the Greek translation many scholars say was supervised by Josephus himself. He burns with the fire of Elazar ben Yair. He has committed ben Yair’s final oration to memory and recites it as if he were a great leader inciting his followers to martyrdom. ‘I cannot but esteem it as a favor that God has granted us, that it is still in our power to die bravely, and in a state of freedom.’”

“He is not under siege by the Romans.”

“Perhaps in his imagination or his worldview.”

“Are you saying he is insane?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying.”

 

-8-

 

Maddie welcomed the deepening dusk as she waited in the rabbi’s study. The sun’s descent spread darkness across the face of the room and the sharp edge of the shadows dissipated into fuzziness. She needed fuzziness. When the short April twilight passed into night, she turned on the desk lamp and sought distraction in the bookcases that wallpapered the study, shelves of bindings with foreign letters. Hebrew letters. The few words in English were meaningless: Mishnah, Midrash, Talmud, Torah. Her heartbeat quickened. She sat on her hands to stop them from trembling. She felt as if she were trapped in the secret lair of an alien cult.

An eternity later, the door to the study opened with a creak and two men, one old, the other older, entered, the old assisting the older who supported himself on a cane and looked like a paragraph sign in profile. Their frailty, their age and infirmities, gave her a sense of empowerment, a sense of having an advantage, and she no longer felt like a stranger in a strange land.

“Let me help,” she offered.

The older one waved her off. “This mishugenah cane. May the Lord take me before they put me in a wheelchair.” He sat. His shirt ballooned as air inflated his clothes. A child’s wristwatch with oversized numbers hung loosely from his wrist. “I’m Jacob Moskovitzky and this is Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben.”

“I’m Attorney Mary Ann Devlin from Suffolk County Legal Services. Everyone calls me Maddie.”

“The Elizabeth Fund?” the rabbi asked.

Maddie nodded. “I came to see you. You contributed $100.00.”

“There are a lot of worthwhile causes to which we can-not afford to contribute but a little.”

“The Archdiocese of Boston with its millions of dollars contributed half that. You would think preventing child abuse would be one of its top priorities.”

The rabbi placed his hands on the desk. His knuckles cast long shadows across the back of his hands. “If Avram is convicted, what in the old country incited pogroms will come to Boston. If he is acquitted, people will believe his innocence was purchased with a few pieces of silver. Either way, the consequences are the same.”

“What is a pogrom?” Maddie asked.

“A pogrom,” the rabbi said, “is what King Billy did to your ancestors.”

Moskovitzky tapped his cane against the edge of the desk. “At my age, I care more about what will be fifty years from now than I do what will be tomorrow.”

“If we don’t focus on the business at hand,” Maddie said, “Levy will spend those fifty years in jail.”

“Frohling says you’re legal aid’s best attorney,” the rabbi said.

“I say you’re a minor-league All-Star,” Moskovitzky said, “who can’t hit big league pitching.”

Maddie started to rise. “Good evening, gentlemen.”

“Sit,” the rabbi said.

“Why?” Maddie replied.

“Sit. Stand,” the rabbi said. “It makes no difference.”

“Let’s get one thing clear,” Maddie said. “If you don’t think I’m the right attorney for this case, I’m out of here. I don’t need the aggravation of shoulder-sitters who think I’m second or third rate.”

“Are you?” the rabbi asked.

Before Maddie could reply, Moskovitzky said, “I changed my name to Mosca and lied about my religion to get into Harvard College and Harvard Law School. I opened the legal profession in Boston to Jews. I created a law firm worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the Solis-Cohen firm in Philadelphia. And what is my legacy? A grandson whose ignorance of the past condemns him to repeat it.” He spoke with a firmness that belied his age, his voice steady, lacking the quaver and high pitch of the elderly.

“The only legacy that matters,” Maddie said, “is Levy’s.”

Moskovitzky ignored her. “Fear and ignorance have blinded my grandson to the consequences of the blood libel accusation.”

Maddie recognized what she called “set speech syndrome.” In court, she often encountered attorneys who arrived with set speeches, determined to give them regardless of what questions the judge might ask. Those attorneys frequently lost their cases. Perhaps, Maddie thought, she could shorten Moskovitzky’s set speech with a question. “What is a blood libel?”

“What is a blood libel, she asks.” Moskovitzky’s voice had that blend of sarcasm and disgust Maddie remembered from her catechism classes when she or one of her classmates asked a question whose answer would have been self-evident to the faithful.

The rabbi answered her question. “For centuries Jews have been accused of draining the blood of Christian boys and using their blood to bake Passover matzoh.”

Maddie recalled how the kids threatened each other in parochial school, especially around Easter. “I’ll sell your blood to the Jews” was the most common threat. She had had nightmares the first time one of her classmates threatened to sell her blood. She didn’t know then the threat had a name, blood libel.

Moskovitzky continued. “Who is to say years from now my grandchildren’s grandchildren won’t again be running from Cossacks?”

Maddie slammed her pen down on her legal pad. “Levy won’t have any grandchildren if we don’t change the subject.”

Moskovitzky and the rabbi glanced at each other, then at her. She saw condemnation in their eyes. Moskovitzky pulled a tissue from his sleeve. “Is it better I lived in America where Jack Mosca went to Harvard or ancient Egypt where Jacob Moskovitzky built pyramids?”

“What does this have to do with Levy?” Maddie said.

The rabbi replied, “Hatred is what this has to do with Avram. Hatred is a spider from whose web few escape. Avram must be defended not only for himself, not only for Jacob’s grandchildren’s grandchildren, but for your grandchildren’s grandchildren as well.”

“I don’t have the luxury of leading a crusade.”

“You wouldn’t talk this way if his name were Robert Emmet,” the rabbi said.

“I would whether you believe me or not.”

Moskovitzky cleared his throat. “Why are you here?”

Feigning social concern would be too transparent. Inviting Moskovitzky to be co-counsel would cede the control she needed to work the case her way. Gutting it out would work if desperation sent them to legal aid. She plucked the doctrine of the excluded middle from her bag of attorney tricks.

“Why do you presume I want to be here? If Frohling orders me to defend Levy and I refuse, he can Section 8 me and have me disbarred, thanks to the Supreme Judicial Court. I bet you didn’t know that, Attorney Moskovitzky. It’s the law. Look it up. Section 8 of my employment contract requires me to accept any assignment made by the director. In Board of Bar Overseers v. Podolec, the Supreme Judicial Court on Frohling’s petition upheld a one-year license suspension for an African-American attorney who refused to defend a member of the Klu Klux Klan for inciting a riot at an anti-school busing demonstration. In dicta, the SJC suggested a second offense would warrant disbarment. If you want me off the case, tell the judge. Without Levy’s consent, I’ll be bounced. I don’t have time for this inquisition.”

The rabbi cringed at her use of that word.

“Point two,” Maddie continued. “It is clear to me from Levy’s behavior at the arraignment he doesn’t want me as his attorney. He wouldn’t be the first. So, do I have a client to defend?”

“Levy will be guided by us,” the rabbi said. “He will do as we recommend.”

“We don’t question your legal abilities, Ms. Devlin,” Moskovitzky said, “but we have every right to satisfy ourselves about your motivations.”

“I have one and only one motivation, to get the best possible result for my client. Subject to the Code of Professional Responsibility I will do what must be done to achieve that result.”

“From the days of the patriarchs and matriarchs,” Moskovitzky said, “Jews have fought for the right to be Jews whether on top of Masada or in the lobby of the King David Hotel. Never, but never, has a Jew committed the crime of blood libel. Punished for it, yes. Many times.” He bowed his head as if his thoughts were too heavy for him. “It has never been a crime in this country to be Jewish; but if Avram is convicted, it will be.” The hum of the fluorescent desk lamp sounded like an alarm warning everyone to the bomb shelters. “My grandson, to him a pogrom is something in a history book. I lived that history.” He placed the cane between his legs, resting his hands on its crown.

Maddie seized the opening. “Jews don’t have a monopoly on being hated. It took Ireland as long to be born as Israel. Irish historians, especially those of the rebellion, see the Irish as another race of Jews. And James Joyce. He made Leopold Bloom, the symbolic father of Stephen Dedalus, Jewish.” She spoke in the calm voice of a scholar leading a seminar, one of her favorite closing argument techniques. “Joyce saw the Irish and Jews as two heroic races destined to wander the face of the earth and shed their own blood to attain a homeland and then shed more blood defending it. Joyce understood that the bond between the Jews and the Irish was the bond between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the bond between father and son.”

“What of the bond between blood relations?” Moskovitzky spat the question with the disdain of a judge who had dismissed her as fatuous and lacking in credibility, then closed his eyes as if he were unable to bear the sight of her. She glanced at the rabbi who seemed lost in thought.

“Trish Sullivan and me?” Maddie rushed her words out of fear of being silenced. “In 1916, my da’s da was executed by an Irish Republican Brotherhood firing squad. Accused of being the informer who tipped the Brits about an IRB raid on a Brit weapons arsenal. Implicated in the death of his brother, Seamus, who led the raid. Convicted on the word of his other brother, Clancy, who bore false witness. Patrick Pearse swore to my grand da’s innocence. Produced evidence Clancy sold his birthright for a pint and a bob. But, Pearse was only one vote on the IRB Military Council and the others voted to convict, to execute. Seamus was Trish’s grand da. Her side of the family never forgave, never forgot. My side neither.”

Moskovitzky opened his eyes, but still looked away. “False witness?”

“Over an inheritance.” The words vomited from her mouth. “Their grand da’s homestead. Clancy got it in his head Patrick would leave it to him, but Patrick left it to my grand da, who was the oldest. Clancy blamed my grand da for poisoning Patrick against him.”

“The mark of Cain,” the rabbi said.

“Except my grand da was innocent.”

“So you do not seek justice for Avram, but for your grandfather,” the rabbi said.

Maddie clenched her jaw. Never had she doubted her grand da’s innocence. Her da had said he was innocent and das never lied to their daughters. Now, the skepticism of these ancient Jews created doubt. What-if her grand da did bear the mark of Cain? It would have passed through the generations to her da, to her, to her daughter. Is this why Elizabeth died an infant? Maddie recoiled at the thought her daughter bore the mark of Cain.

“Is there a bathroom I can use?” she asked.

The rabbi pointed to a door bunkered by bookcases.

In the bathroom mirror Maddie saw the mark of Cain staining her face, bold and ugly like a purple birthmark, the devil’s mark according to the nuns of her childhood. Maddie did deep-breathing exercises for several minutes to compose herself, then flushed the toilet, ran the cold water, splashed some on her face, and swallowed her emotions because attorneys, especially attorneys in her line of work, could not be subservient to their emotions. Her faith in her grand da’s innocence reaffirmed, she returned to the rabbi’s study.

The rabbi nodded at Moskovitzky who asked, “What of your vow never to defend someone accused of murdering a child? How did you avoid being disbarred for refusing those cases?”

Maddie felt like a witness caught in a lie on cross-examination. “Those cases were not assigned to me. This one has been because I am the only legal aid attorney capable of handling it.”

“It is a terrible thing,” the rabbi said, “when a mother buries a daughter, but it is more terrible when after so many years grief still warps the mother. Grief can destabilize a mind from within.”

Was her struggle with her impacted rage that obvious, Maddie wondered. Grief had destabilized her from within, but she had wrestled with her grief, sometimes with more success, sometimes with less; but she had channeled her grief so that now her infant daughter lived in her memories and in the Elizabeth Fund. Would she have had my face? My coloring? My temperament? Would she have looked like a Devlin? Or her father? No, the Devlin genes ruled. She had seen that in her daughter’s eyes moments after her birth. Now, what remained? Grief and memories in all their fallibility; and, a crusade against child abuse.

“Yes,” Maddie said. “A terrible thing. But the director holds Section 8 over me like a death sentence.” She cursed herself for the sophistry, the circularity, of her argument.

“So, quit work,” Moskovitzky said.

“Hanging out my shingle takes courage, more than I have.”

“Yet, you would have us believe you have the courage to defend Levy,” Moskovitzky said.

His accusation shredded her composure. She struggled to maintain self-control. Judges who acted as inquisitors were not new to her; nor were judges who dismissed her arguments as lacking foundation in law or fact. On the contrary, judges respected her for being fearless in court, unlike attorneys cowed into subservience by a judge’s raised eyebrow or off-the-cuff comment. She counted to three, then said, “Nothing I say will still your doubts.”

“Perhaps, Jacob,” the rabbi said, “a time such as this requires an act of faith.”

“Faith has murdered too many of our people.”

“Yes, but without faith, would Abraham have entered into the Covenant? Would Moses have led his people into the Red Sea? Would our people have survived the destruction of the First and Second Temples? The Holocaust?”

“Faith did not win the Six-Day War,” Moskovitzky said.

“Without faith there would have been no Israel to fight that war.”

“How often does our worst enemy come disguised as a friend?”

“As often as a friend comes disguised as an enemy,” the rabbi replied.

Rabbi ben Reuben massaged his knuckles. His entire life had brought him to this moment. Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh., one of the ways pious Jews referred to God, had demanded of Abraham an act of faith. Now Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh. demanded the same of him. But what was that act of faith? Blessing Attorney Devlin? Dismissing her? If he acted out of faith, would that prevent him from making the wrong choice? Would Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh. ordain his making the wrong choice? He had to believe, he had to have faith, that his choice, whatever it was, was Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh.’s choice and that it was the right choice. That was the essence of faith, the essence of belief. He felt so inadequate, so unprepared.

The rabbi looked Maddie in the eye. She did not blink. She did not turn away. Her expression remained unchanged, frozen, her lips pressed together. Moskovitzky rested his chin on the head of his cane, his eyes closed. The rabbi was alone, but not alone. Reason would not guide him. Nor emotion. Only faith. Faith in Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh. who had let him down, let His people down, so many times before. An old Jewish folk saying came to mind, one he had used in many sermons over the years: A drowning man will grab even for the blade of a sword. Once again Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh. had hurled His people into the raging waters and once again extended to them the blade of a sword. Refuse it and they will surely drown. Accept it and they may be saved. The rabbi closed his eyes to trap the tears he felt forming, then opened them. “Will you represent Avram, Attorney Devlin?”

“If he will have me.”

“He will have you,” the rabbi replied.

“Do you concur?” Maddie asked Moskovitzky.

“If I do not?”

“You will have to leave,” Maddie replied, “as your presence creates a waiver of the attorney-client privilege.”

“I feel like Moses at the Red Sea before he stepped into the water.” Moskovitzky took a deep breath. The air in his lungs rattled. He looked down at the handle of his cane, then whispered, “I concur.”

“Good. Let’s get to work. What do you know about Mr. Levy’s background?”

Without pausing, the rabbi related how Levy joined the congregation the previous fall after moving from New York, how he was studying Talmud and supporting himself by working in a Jewish funeral home, how he held life so sacred he would let the fly flit across his bread rather than swat it.

“I’ll visit him in the morning.”

“On the Sabbath?” the rabbi said.

“A case like this, every day’s a work day.”

Rabbi ben Reuben and Moskovitzky glanced at each other. Now they understood why Levy did not want her to represent him. He had intuited this about her, that she would raise the profane above the sacred. He would resist their recommendation, resist her. Levy’s future depended on his resistance being overcome. The rabbi nodded. Moskovitzky returned the nod. Maddie rose and shook their hands. She wanted to leave before either or both of them had a change of mind, a change of heart. Good trial lawyers knew better than to overstay their welcome before the jury.

As she walked to her car, Maddie felt trapped inside the past, her past, Ireland’s past. Today descended from yesterday in as never-ending torrent of “begets” as any found in the Holy Bible. Robert Emmet begat Robert Michael Arthur Devlin, named Devlin rather than Emmet to hide him from the British, Michael and Arthur being two Devlin cousins, both veterans of the Rising of 1798 and the Rising of 1803 which begat the Easter Rising of 1916 which begat the Republic of Ireland. In 1829, Robert begat Brian Winifred Devlin who begat Richard Luke Devlin, who begat Patrick Hugh Devlin, who begat Michael Parnell Devlin, who begat Brian Arthur Devlin, Maddie’s da, a poor soul imprisoned in the provenance of his name. Patrick Hugh Devlin also begat Brian’s brothers, Clancy Richard Devlin, the informer, and Seamus Emmet Devlin, da of Tommy Devlin, grand da of Beatrice “Trish” Devlin Sullivan, First Lady of Boston, Maddie’s second cousin, mother of Charles F. “Bumper” Sullivan, III.

Since ancient times, Finn mac Cumaill lay within an unremembered Irish hillock. Today, Finn mac Cumaill and his band of mercenary warriors marched through the streets of Boston. What of today? What of this infernal April day? And the next day? And the day after that? What of these days? In her name and blood, in her memories and deeds, Maddie had entered upon the burning sands that bridged the chasm between the old and the new, the new and the old, condemned to sift through the grains for the courage to answer the call as so many Devlins had before her. But whose call? God’s or the devil’s?

Was this the second step to her winning the fight with her impacted rage? She had reached her car before she realized she had crossed her fingers. She laughed at herself for adopting a silly superstition, then remembered that humor, Dr. Przystas had counseled, was one of the coping mechanisms for dealing with impacted rage.

 

-9-

 

Later that night, Rabbi ben Reuben brought a kosher dinner to Avram Levy at the Charles Street Jail. The temperature was high enough to boil the moisture in the air and weather forecasts offered no prospect of relief. In the history of weather records for the Boston area, one meteorologist reported, no high-pressure system had been so stationary for so long. The jet stream had a stranglehold on Boston, the northeast, the North Atlantic, with a malevolent anger that put to shame the anger Moses felt upon seeing the golden calf when he descended Mount Sinai with the tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Unable to park near the jail, the rabbi left his car at the foot of Beacon Hill and pulled himself up the staircase of the footbridge that spanned the Charles Street rotary.

In the evening, pedestrian traffic to and from the neighboring hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital and Massachusetts Eye and Ear, made the walk safe, but visiting hours had ended and he was alone. Age intensified his apprehension as did the incessant talk of blood libel on television and radio, especially talk radio where the ignorance and prejudice of the callers rivaled only that of the hosts, the nationally syndicated shows being more virulent than the local shows. A shard of memory stirred, then vanished before coalescing into something recognizable, another of the tricks his mind now played on him since he first heard the phrase “blood libel” on the television news the morning after the Sullivan boy’s blood-drained body had been discovered.

The rabbi struggled to climb the staircase while balancing a Styrofoam plate on his palm, its warmth radiating through the bottom. Since coming to America, the rabbi had prided himself for not falling prey to the debate of why a benevolent God permitted such evil as the Holocaust. Nor did he believe this benevolent God would correct His mistakes and make everything all right. Many of his colleagues in the rabbinate indicted him for lacking faith.

“What do you really know of faith?” he replied. “Words in a sermon?”

To which those rabbis said, “Where was the Yod. Heh. Vav. Heh. who stayed Abraham’s hand and parted the Red Sea? Whose fire did not consume the bush? Who handed down the tablets to Moses? Was the Covenant a tease? Or, worse, a bait and switch? Why did His chosen people cower in fetid jail cells while those who would destroy them, annihilate them, enjoy the pleasures of their indulgences? When life itself became the lesson, nothing good follows.”

Unbeknownst to the rabbi, his faith had been imprisoned in the same black hole as his memories of his personal experiences during the Nazi era. On the boat crossing the Atlantic, he had flipped the coin of Pascal’s wager. Now, years later, he still waited for it to land. Heads or tails? Or, on its edge? He doubted it made a difference.

From the shadows of the overpass, a voice still and small emanated. “Spare some change? Please, mister. I’s starving.”

A black youth stepped out of the shadows. Dirt streaked his face. He wore a faded tee shirt freckled with bleach stains, over his heart a Trojan horse in silhouette. His pants were rolled up at the cuffs. The soles of his sneakers flapped as he walked.

“Please, mister. I needin’ eats bad.”

The rabbi’s thumb pierced the foil and a wisp of steam escaped. He wished he had two plates. “Wait here. When I come back, I’ll buy you something to eat.”

“No feedin’ bloodsuckers.” The boy punched at the plate. The rabbi twisted sideways to deflect the blow, absorbing it in his forearm. The plate tottered and the rabbi grabbed it with his other hand so it wouldn’t fall. The boy kicked at the rabbi’s shins. The rabbi curved his body over the plate as if it were an infant he was protecting from a sudden storm. The boy made guns out of his fingers and thumbs, then shouted, “Next time, you be wasted.” The boy vaulted down the stairs two at a time and jumped into a waiting car.

The rabbi leaned on the railing and recited the Shema. It pained him to see so much hatred in someone so young. In an adult, he understood; but to pass it on to an innocent youth was a sin worse than violating the laws of Kashreit.

In the visitor’s lobby of the Charles Street Jail, he stared at the barred windows. They reminded him of the ticket windows of a train station. After the war, he had traveled by train across Europe to London to catch a boat to New York. The bell to the left of the window reminded him of the clerk who refused to sell him a ticket because he had arrived a minute after the ticket window had closed for the day. The steam hissing out of the radiators reminded him of the locomotive pulling the train he had missed because he didn’t have a ticket. But, the hollow voice that growled at him from the speaker mounted on the wall above the lobby door, that voice he had heard before. Where he had heard it, he did not remember. What it had said, he did not remember.

“Identify yourself and state your business.”

“Rabbi Isaac ben Reuben with a kosher meal for Avram Levy.” A door sprung open and he entered a large room, empty except for a table and one chair. An unshielded bulb bathed the room with a light that burnished the hard metallic surfaces of the table and chair in a hard glare. A second bulb flickered randomly as if it were trying to communicate a message in code.

He placed Avram’s dinner on the table and waited. He had waited in a room like this before, an interview room at the Port of New York for questioning by immigration officers while the authenticity of his travel documents was verified. Yet, this room had a vague resemblance to some other room he had once waited in. He closed his eyes, but all he saw was the dark. He wished his mind would stop playing tricks on him.

Finally, a door labeled ‘Welcome’ opened and two prison guards in drab brown uniforms entered. One searched him while the other, acting as if he expected a bomb, removed the foil from the plate and poked through the food with the stub of a pencil. The boiled chicken, overcooked as the rabbi always prepared it, fell away from the bone and settled on the rice and sweet potato. The challah now had the guard’s thumbprint in its center.

“I got the knife and fork,” said the guard whose name tag was taped over.

“Strip,” said the other. He did not wear a tag.

“Never before. Why now?”

“Strip. Don’t strip. I don’t give a fuck, but you wanna see the Jew, you strip.”

‘The Jew’, the rabbi thought, as he undressed. First, bloodsucker; now, the Jew. That’s how it starts. Turning a person into a thing. He felt chilled in spite of the heat. Now, as he removed his shirt, he started shaking and did not stop while the prison guards, laughing and joking, searched for contraband. In all his previous visits to other inmates never had the search for contraband been anything more than a perfunctory pat-down, fully clothed. Why, he wanted to ask; but he knew what the answer would be.

“Looking for lice,” one of the guards said.

Lice. For years, the rabbi had been so paranoid about head lice that he shampooed his hair several times a day, something he still did. Obsessive-compulsive behavior, a psychologist once told him. Where does it come from? he had asked. Something in your past, the psychologist had replied. Nothing that I remember, the rabbi had said. Acting out is a form of remembering without actually remembering, said the psychologist. The rabbi did not ask for an explanation because he knew he would not understand it.

Now the rabbi dressed and both guards, one by his side, the other behind him carrying Levy’s dinner, escorted him to the visiting area where he was seated behind a bullet-proof partition that divided the room. The guard with the dinner appeared on the other side. “Five minutes,” the guard who remained by his side said. “I’ll be here, he’ll be there.”

“The statutory privilege,” Rabbi ben Reuben said, “between clergy and . . . ”

“You being here’s a fucking privilege.”

On the other side of the barrier, Levy entered and sagged into the chair opposite the rabbi. He scooped his dinner with his fingers, eating like a young child breaking the Yom Kippur fast. Kernels of rice and shreds of chicken and bits of sweet potato clung to the stubble of his beard. Watching him eat, the rabbi wanted to ask him if he did it, but he knew better than doing so in the presence of the guards. Their presence nullified the clergy privilege granted by Massachusetts law to conversations between rabbis and their congregants.

“Jacob and I met with Attorney Maddie Devlin.”

“She’s traif.”

Levy’s vehemence surprised the rabbi. The guard on Levy’s side of the partition smirked and shook his head.

“She desecrates the Sabbath.” Levy tried to rise, but the guard shoved him back into his chair.

“Try that again,” the guard said, “and dinner’s kaput.”

“She does not dress modestly. She does not wear a wig. She is not my Esther.”

“Jacob has tried a few cases in his day. He’ll keep an eye on her.”

“And if Hashem should strike him blind?”

“Then he will see with his ears.”

“Traif,” Levy repeated.

“Time.” The guard put his hand on the rabbi’s shoulder.

“I’ll come back tomorrow to conduct a havdalah service.”

“Yizkor would be more appropriate.”

The Rabbi shivered as he crossed the footbridge over the Charles Street rotary. He searched the street below for the car the boy had jumped into, the shadows for the boy himself. Who’s watching me? Why? He knew who; he knew why. He feared for his future, for the future. Fear was the price of being a survivor. No one spied on the defeated or the conquered, the dying or the dead; they spied on the living, on the fighters, on those who refused to concede the struggle. America had dulled his fear, had deadened him. Now, for the first time since he immigrated to America, he felt alive. Now, he knew better. Silently, he offered a toast, l’chaim. To life.