Israel (82 page)

“What happened?” Danny smiled at the thought of how Herschel would drool over such a bonanza.

“That kind of deal, there's no way to do it without spreading the bribes all the way to the top. There are just too many officials involved. Anyway, I put some feelers out to a contact in Navy Intelligence—we did them some favors during the war—and the word came back. No way. No one would touch a bribe for that; the official word is that our country is neutral.”

“Which means screw the Jews,” Danny remarked, “just like always.”

“Truman wants to keep things nice and cozy with England while they try and put Europe back together. My contact in Navy Intelligence said that when the limeys finally pull out”—Benny pointed his finger—“and that's when, not
if
—Truman is going to slap an arms embargo on the Middle East.”

“Yeah, that's neutral all right,” Danny growled, “except that the Arabs already have guns.”

“And ve vas only neutral too.” Benny mocked. “Ve only put dem in der gas chambers, ve didn't tell dem to breathe.” He looked at Danny as he made up his mind. “Sorry, kid. It's too risky.”

Danny imagined how it would be to tell Herschel he'd failed. “Listen, Benny. The machinery I told you about is a lot less obvious than tommy guns. Your plan called for officials to pretend they didn't see weapons. All we need is for them not to look too hard. We've got plenty of perfectly legal stuff for camouflage.”

“I still think that as soon as the Feds suspect you intend to ship your stuff to Palestine they'll be all over you.”

“Then I won't let them find out. Now, you want to talk business or no?”

Danny called Herschel from a pay telephone around the corner from Benny's office. “We've got ourselves a warehouse in the Bronx.”

“How much?”

“It's perfect for us. It's got everything we need.”

“How much?”

“Five thousand.”

“Oy! Danny, go back and see if we can lease instead of buy—”

Danny closed his eyes. “That is to lease.”

“Impossible! You told me this so-called friend of yours was a Jew.”

“Look.” Danny struggled to control his temper. “This isn't Palestine and the Jews here aren't Socialists—not the ones we need to do business with at least. Here people want to make a profit when they do business, and that means we have to pay them to take this big a risk. It's only fair, and besides, if we hurt feelings and make enemies, somebody will inform on us and we'll be washed up before we even get started. In this particular case I believe
my friend is in a position to do a lot more for us than just lease us a warehouse. Maybe some of that five thousand is going for that, okay?”

Herschel sighed; in the past two weeks Danny had come to be amazed at just how eloquent the Palestinian's exhalations could be.

“I think Leo knew what he was saying when he told me that I needed you. Thanks.”

“Hey, somebody's got to look out for a greenhorn like you,” Danny replied. When they hung up his heart was racing. Somebody needed him. It was weird, wonderful, and it made him feel ten feet tall.

As the months passed and Herschel and Danny's working relationship deepened, the Palestinian's respect and admiration for his assistant increased. The two seemed to compensate for each other's shortcomings. When Herschel lost his temper over some petty mishap, Danny was quick to calm him down and restore his perspective. When Danny's pessimism flared and he began complaining that something couldn't be done, Herschel's enthusiasm restored the younger man's spirit.

It was strange to feel so close to the boy and yet know so little about him, but the less they knew about any of their associates the better. Herschel had even encouraged Danny to use phony identification when he attended the war surplus auctions, open only to U.S. citizens.

The majority of their purchases were from private dealers. If the seller was Jewish, an Institute phone call would smooth the way for Herschel and his assistant buyers. Meanwhile, his staff of student researchers continued to compile the technical information to manufacture munitions.

As their warehouse filled up Danny turned his attention to smuggling. A great deal of what they were shipping was innocuous and could go out as agricultural or textile
machinery. This would not do, however, for the more specialized items. There was no way to make a cartridge-loading machine look like a lathe. A method of camouflage had to be devised.

They came up with two ideas. The first was Danny's and stemmed from his childhood. He explained to Herschel about his youthful passion for assembling model airplanes. They went and bought a kit. Each numbered part, considered by itself, could have been a component of anything at all, and the kit came with an exploded schematic diagram as well as step-by-step instructions for its assembly.

The Institute supplied them with more student volunteers, who began the laborious process of dismantling the machinery and code-numbering the parts. Others looked over their shoulders and compiled instructions for reassembling it, after which they randomly scattered the pieces into harmless-looking crates.

The second idea was Herschel's. It was to use a technique perfected by Ehud Avriel, owner of a machine shop in Warsaw. Over the last decade Avriel had shipped thousands of weapons to kibbutzim by stripping down tractors, filling them with contraband, and then welding the bodies back together. In the same manner Herschel and Danny bought boilers, transformers and other large industrial machines that could be hollowed out and filled with contraband.

Their Institute connections came up with sympathetic export companies to furnish them their licenses, and Danny cajoled Benny Talkin into supplying his trucks and his father-in-law's influence to move the cargo through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Port of New York.

Neither system would have been sufficient on its own, but together the two served to transport tons of clandestine cargo into Palestine.

*     *     *

In June the Anglo-American Committee, formed at President Truman's suggestion to resolve the deadlock on immigration between the British government and the Jews, issued its report. On one hand it called for the repeal of all immigration restrictions to Palestine; on the other it called for the immediate dissolution of all private armies; in other words, Haganah and the lrgun. The British government rejected the committee's findings and announced its intention to use Palestine as a military base.

The “private armies” responded by blowing up bridges and railroad tracks, by raiding British arms caches, by doing everything in their power to obstruct the British in Palestine. The British struck back with massive sweeps, carting off thousands of Jews to detention camps.

In July Herschel's contacts warned him to prepare for trouble. On July twenty-second Irgun forces blew up Jerusalem's King David Hotel, the social center for the British. More than ninety people were killed and the explosion razed the hotel.

Moderate Jews all over the world denounced the attack. Ben-Gurion, safely in Paris, specifically denounced the lrgun as the enemy of the Jewish people, although the lrgun had executed the attack with Haganah's approval. Now Begin's force was ordered to bear the blame; it was hoped that the British could then find their way to a politically acceptable compromise with Haganah.

Instead the British invaded. An additional twenty thousand troops joined the established ten thousand. A white paper was released; it detailed Haganah's involvement in terrorism. A curfew for Jews was instituted; violators were to be shot on sight. When lrgun prisoners were flogged, British officers were kidnapped and whipped. In America Jews began to boycott British businesses, and in England Winston Churchill himself accused Bevin's government of acting dishonorably.

The British government, stung by worldwide disapproval,
announced the death penalty for terrorists. The lrgun attacks continued, the curfew was maintained and the British retreated into highly guarded security zones. They rarely traveled without large armed escorts. Palestine was their prison.

The increased violence worked against Herschel and Danny in two ways. First, the bloodshed frightened off many of the more moderate members of Sonneborn's Institute.

Second, the increased British activity in Palestine caused the Haganah to modify its original plan. It had been thought the military supplies would be reassembled and put into operation at once in order to begin a stockpile of home-grown weaponry for the day the British left and the Jews would have to defend themselves against the Arabs.

That was now too risky. The British had increased their anti-terrorist activities, which meant there was an increased risk of the machinery being discovered and confiscated. Accordingly, Zionist leadership's attention turned to its operatives in Europe, who had been concentrating on ready-made arms, reasoning that a cache was easier to hide than a factory.

Herschel Kol found himself feeling unaccountably slighted and jealous now that his sphere of operations had been nudged out of the limelight. He, Danny and many others had been working to give Palestine an arms industry. Now they would not know if they had succeeded until the British were gone, which meant that there would be no time to get the machinery unpacked, assembled and running before the Arabs were upon them.

As far as Herschel was concerned, that just made his own pet project—an easily and cheaply manufactured submachine gun—all the more important.

As soon as he decided he could delegate authority to Danny, Herschel turned his attention to his gun. In February
an Institute contact informed Herschel that he'd found the man for the job.

Wilbur Burns was a sixty-five-year-old semi-retired gunsmith who lived with his wife in Providence, Rhode Island. In his youth Burns worked for a local company on light machine guns.

The go-between, a Rhode Island businessman who had been in the arms business during the war, intimated to Burns that he would be interested in sponsoring an effort to design a new kind of submachine gun. Burns, who'd come to think his gunmaking days were over, leaped at the opportunity. A few days later Herschel took the train to Providence to meet him.

Burns met Herschel's train and drove him in his battered, rusting Ford to his two-family clapboard house on a modest side street.

Herschel concentrated on his host's personality and character. This was New England, and Burns, with his pale blue eyes, long, thin face and grey crew-cut, with his flannel shirt and corncob pipe, was a WASP. Herschel wondered whether the man would be so friendly when he found out what the gun was for. Herschel would have to tell Burns everything. He wanted the gunsmith to design not only the weapon, but the machines that would be needed to manufacture it. For that Burns would have to take into account the workplace.

Mrs. Burns was a stout, cheery woman with grey hair tinted blue and horn-rimmed eyeglasses studded with rhinestones. She made tea, set out cookies and retired to the parlor so the two men could talk business over her oilcloth-covered kitchen table.

They almost immediately agreed on design principles. Burns would attempt to design a sheet-metal stamped gun so cheap to make that when it broke, it would be thrown away rather than repaired. They discussed fitting a magazine-loading tool into the collapsible wire shoulder stock, an oil
can into the hand grip and an optional flash hider to be used at night. They decided on a price of seventeen thousand dollars and a deadline of six months for the design.

Finally the time came for Herschel to reveal just who would be employing Burns. The gunsmith listened intently, puffing on his corncob pipe.

He thought a minute after Herschel finished and then said, “I can trace my family back to the days when they followed Roger Williams out of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and came here for religious freedom. Roger Williams didn't take this land from the Indians, he bought it from them fair and square, and then he made Providence a homeland for folks who wanted to do things their own way. It seems to me that you folks are in the same boat as old Roger and my people, and if my ancestors helped him, I guess I can help you.”

That was in February. The six months were almost up. Now Herschel Kol was preoccupied as he went about his business, checking in with the students and hoping Wilbur Burns had called and his blueprints were ready.

Carl Pickman slammed down the telephone. He sat statue-still, trying to calm himself, trying to will away the angry throbbing in his temples.

It was no use. His sister Deborah's complaining voice was still droning in his mind.

“When Daddy stuck Robert in accounting I didn't say a word, Carl. I didn't expect him to start at the top just because he's my husband. He's been comptroller for almost ten years now. I think it's time for him to take a more active role in running the store. You're not in your office very much anymore. Robert deserves his chance. Rebecca is very sweet, but she's not the family's choice to run the store. Amy agrees with me, Carl, and between us we control thirty percent of the stock.”

Carl rose from his chair and left his study. He wandered down the long corridor of the apartment into the living room. It was a high-ceilinged, lavish room with gilded mirrors, old brocades and two magnificent chandeliers. The decorators had been closely supervised by Becky; the entire apartment had been done to her taste.

“I want fine old things, Carl,” she said. “Nothing new. The only way to judge the quality of what's new is
by its price tag. What's old, what endures is what's valuable.”

Carl loved what she'd done with their apartment, perhaps because he loved her. Being surrounded by her taste and personality made him feel relaxed and secure.

He moved to the great picture window that overlooked Central Park. From this high vantage at the very peak of summer the verdant landscape resembled a jungle carpet and the lake glittered like quicksilver in the firecracker July sun.