Breakdown (10 page)

“Why?” Jake asked.

“The anti-immigration hysteria that’s gripping parts of the country,” Max explained. “You know that the foundation’s mission is with immigrants and refugees? It’s why Lotty and I sit on the board, and maybe why we follow more closely than you the way Global Entertainment keeps attacking the foundation along with Chaim. They claim that Chaim is anti-American, or trying to destroy America, and they point to Malina as proof. Malina is an old Yiddish word for a hiding place inside a ghetto, and people like Lawlor pounce on that—they say Salanter chose the name because he’s smuggling illegals into the country. They say he’s laughing at America by running the foundation as a training camp for terrorists.”

“Yes.” Lotty shuddered. “I can hardly bear to imagine what Wade Lawlor will say if he learns that the girls in Petra’s group were acting out vampire fantasies.”

“Julia said Lawlor will accuse her father of being a Nazi sucking Christian blood,” I said, “but I thought the Salanters were Jews.”

“They are.” Lotty’s mouth set in a hard line. “It’s despicable, what they say about Chaim. He somehow survived the 1941 Yom Kippur massacre in the Vilna ghetto. His family was annihilated that day, but he slipped out and managed to survive on the streets for the next four years. Lawlor twists that to mean that a thirteen-year-old boy bartered his mother and father for his own life.”

“This is completely outrageous,” Jake exclaimed. “Why doesn’t Salanter sue?”

“He says it will just bring more attention to the lies that Lawlor and Global are telling,” Max said. “I think it’s a mistake to let them get away with it—it’s letting them ape Goebbels: keep repeating outrageous lies and people believe them.”

“I haven’t watched much of GEN’s campaign coverage,” I said. “I know they support Kendrick, but she’s such a wing-nut—she wants to teach Creationism in the public schools, she’s proposed jail terms for women who have abortions, she wants to outlaw Social Security and Medicaid—I just assumed no one could take her seriously. But if Global is positioning Salanter as the fulcrum of the axis of evil—”

“Yes. It’s dangerous, shocking, vile. I never thought I would hear such language in America—” Lotty broke off mid-sentence.

Lotty’s grandfather had sent her and her brother from Vienna to London with the Kindertransport in the summer of 1939. English immigration laws meant the adults had to stay behind, and they all— grandparents, parents, aunts, as well as her cousins whose family lacked the money or connections to send them west—had perished in the death camps.

Lotty and Max—who’d come to London from Prague, also with the Kindertransport—had grown up in central Europe listening to anti-Jewish hatred on the airwaves and in their schools. I could only imagine how painful it must be to hear the same lies bleated again in America.

Jake gave Lotty’s shoulder a sympathetic squeeze and went into the apartment. We heard him at the piano, softly playing “Erbarme dich,” from Bach’s
St.
Matthew Passion
. We sat for a long time in the dark, watching the moonlight ripple on the black lake beyond, as Jake improvised on the melody. The bass is his instrument but he can handle a piano—he says it’s just a bass with two hundred thirty strings.

After a time, I went to sit next to him. He put his right arm around me; with his left, he played the chords and coached me through the aria.

Later, back at our own building on Racine, Jake came into my place with me. From some perverse impulse, we turned on the television to see if we could find Wade Lawlor’s show. Since GEN broadcast it four times a day, we caught the ten-o’clock broadcast.

I fetched my mother’s Italian wineglasses and a bottle of Black Label—I had a feeling that we’d need something to calm our nerves. After the appropriate drumrolls and logos and ads, the camera moved in on a stern-looking Wade Lawlor, sitting in an armchair next to a small table covered with books and papers.

He was wearing his usual blue-checked shirt, his thick hair in its carefully arranged tangle. When I met him last night, I hadn’t noticed the intense blue of his eyes, but I realized now he wore the blue shirt to make his eyes stand out on camera. At the beginning of the show, he leaned back in the chair, but as the broadcast wore on, his urgency moved him to the edge of the seat and his head came up and out at the viewer like a frenzied adder’s.

“My fellow Americans,” he began, as if he were the president of the United States. “My comrades in arms, my brothers and sisters who share my passion for liberty and my fear that we are letting Fascists, Communists, even terrorists who are hiding under protection of our Constitution”—here he broke off to wave a piece of yellowed parchment in front of the camera—“we are letting terrorists flush our precious freedoms down the toilet to Mexico.”

He took a sip of water—his emotion was so powerful he had to steady himself.

I’ve talked to you before about one of these terrorists. He operates brazenly, boldly, right here in Chicago, and he has no use for America or Americans any more than he had use for his parents or siblings or friends in the country of his birth. That’s right. I’m talking about Chaim Salanter.

“Chaim” should be pronounced to rhyme with “time,” or even “rhyme,” but Lawlor deliberately mispronounced it to make it sound like “shame.”

When he was thirteen,
Chame
Salanter came of age, under Jewish law. Now, I’ve gotten ugly e-mail from terrorist sympathizers, telling me I’m not saying that name right, but I’m an American and I only know how to talk one language, American.

So back in Foreignland, the first thing this new young man
Chame
did was get rid of his parents. Yep,
Chame
sold his parents to the Nazi invaders, and they let him out, maybe the one life they should have taken, but they spared him so he could operate ruthlessly on the streets of Vilnius.
Chame
bought and sold the trinkets of desperate people and began to amass his fortune.

Lawlor opened a book and the camera panned on photos of gaunt Jews with stars on their coats, standing in a barren city square. There was no way of knowing where or when the picture had been taken.

Using the chaos of post-war Europe as a convenient cover,
Chame
Salanter came to the United States, pretending to be a refugee. A ruthless Communist like him learned how to milk the capitalist system. He’d dealt in poor people’s last hopes in Lithuania; here in America he turned to the same trade, scrap metal, but he soon saw that the real money was in the fake markets, the stocks and bonds and options and other things too sophisticated for people like you and me to understand.

Chame
took our savings and turned them into one ginormous fortune. And now he’s using that fortune as a Trojan horse. He has a foundation, the Malina Foundation [
background footage of the Malina Building with a big wooden horse rolling through the front doors onto Van Buren Street
].

Malina looks out for the “rights” [
Lawlor made air quotes with his fingers
] of refugees and immigrants. What is that but a big cover for sneaking terrorists into America, just as he snuck here himself ? What about your rights?

And last night, an American citizen, a hardworking American trying to make an honest dollar, was brutally murdered in an abandoned
Jewish
cemetery.

We saw the familiar footage of Mount Moriah cemetery, with the temple where Wuchnik’s body had been found. Lawlor’s cameraman added a close-up of several Jewish gravestones, with the six-pointed stars on them.

And who was right there in the middle of the cemetery, dancing around the dead man before his blood was cold? Why,
Chame
Salanter’s cute-as-a-button granddaughter. And who was with her? The daughter of Sophy
Duran-goo
, the offspring of the monkey in the zoo, who thinks she needs to go to Washington to represent the good and honest people of Illinois.

And dancing right along with them? Children of illegal aliens that
Chame
and his Malina Foundation have brazenly smuggled into the United States to take jobs away from good and decent Americans like you! It’s time we told
Chame
to go home, to take his terrorist pals with him, and to send
Duran-goo
back to the zoo!

And before you liberals start in with your smears and blood libels against me, remember,
Duran-goo
’s the one who brought monkeys into the debate. She thinks she’s descended from a monkey, not created in the image of God like you and me. If that’s racism, I totally give up on the United States of America as a place where free speech is allowed. It’s
Heil Duran-goo, Heil Obama, Heil Salanter,
as we march the United States over a cliff.

By the end of the rampage, I was biting my lip so hard I drew blood. Jake was furious. “That’s disgusting and obscene! How does he get away with it?”

“We let him get away with it!” I poured us both out a good dose of whisky; my hand was none too steady. “I think you’re right, that Salanter should sue Lawlor. Otherwise those lies will just fill up more and more of people’s heads.”

“You don’t think there could be some truth?” Jake suggested.

“No smoke without fire? You really think a child locked in the Vilna ghetto did some deal with the Nazis to murder his parents in exchange for his own freedom?” My face flooded with color.

“Don’t give me the eye of death, V.I.! Of course I don’t. But if he isn’t sitting on something ugly, why won’t he confront Lawlor?”

“Maybe he puts too much faith in reason, or believes Americans are too decent to be taken in. I don’t know.” I moved fretfully around the room. “The girls I saw last night—Salanter’s own granddaughter—they’re the age he was when he was living alone in a war zone. They’re halfway between children and women; they’re old enough to look after themselves but they don’t have good judgment. If Salanter—if any child that age—did something questionable to survive—”

I broke off, as I began to imagine horrific things that Salanter could have done—or his granddaughter, come to that. If she and her friends had stumbled on Miles Wuchnik and killed him, I wouldn’t believe their youth made murder acceptable. If Salanter had done something dreadful in the middle of occupied Lithuania, did the occupation excuse his acts?

“But how did Lawlor get the news that Salanter’s granddaughter was in the cemetery—not to mention the two immigrant girls?” I said. “When I saw Durango and Julia Salanter this afternoon—”

My phone rang mid-sentence. It didn’t surprise me to hear Julia Salanter on the other end of the line.

“Dr. Durango and I trusted you to keep—”

“Never begin a sentence with an accusation,” I cut her off. “I didn’t betray your confidence. I just watched Lawlor’s show—it’s sickening, and I don’t blame you for being upset, but I am not the person who leaked the news to him.”

“Then who did?” Salanter demanded.

“I don’t know, and, as I said this afternoon, I think it would be close to impossible to find out. Lawlor has people trolling blogs and Facebook and police blotters, looking for little grains of scandal to use to back up his big lies. I still think your dad should sue him for slander, and libel, but I can’t solve the leak problem for you.”

“Chaim won’t sue,” Julia said. “We don’t want more fingers poking through our history than happens already!”

“Then you have an insoluble problem,” I said dryly. “There are no brakes on what anyone can say online these days. I suppose you could start your own PR offensive, if you wanted to change the dialogue.”

“We don’t have anything to hide or prove. But we talked to our lawyer and to our publicist, and we’ve all agreed that the best thing we can do is to be open about what happened. Our publicist arranged for the girls to appear on television tomorrow—the Rachel Lyle show. We hate doing it, Chaim most of all: we’ve always tried to keep our lives emphatically private, but Rachel will run a sympathetic interview, and we owe it to Sophy to try to limit damage to her campaign.”

“Oh, this obsession with damage control!” When Julia started to bristle, I cut her off. “Yes, I understand why you’re doing it, but I’m more interested in what the girls know about Miles Wuchnik.”

“Why?” she demanded sharply. “You’re not trying to suggest they were involved in his death, I trust.”

“No. But they knew something, about Wuchnik, or the way the murder was committed. If one of the girls didn’t tell him they were going to Mount Moriah, how did he and his killer know they’d be there?”

“It’s what you just said,” Julia snapped. “You can’t chase down leaks. The girls texted, or one of them blabbed to someone who blabbed to someone. But don’t imply that my daughter went behind my back and talked to a third-rate private eye. Or you’ll find that there are some legal actions the Salanter family is willing to undertake.”

“Squashing a small person, leaving a big one to go on his merry way, you mean?” I couldn’t keep the words back, but it wasn’t surprising that she hung up on me.

10.