by Joel Deutsch
MIDDLE EAST TENSIONS come Home to Los Angeles
Jewish Activists Arrested, Charged With Planning Anti-Muslim Bombings
By Meredith McSweeney
“That’s it!” exclaimed Daniel, pointing. “right on the home page. Just click on the headline.”
“I know how to click a news article open, okay?” Sasha grumbled. He palmed his mouse around its pad until the pointer touched the headline link and then pressed the button. Irina shot Daniel a quick smile and a sympathetic shrug.
The time display in the corner of the PC’s screen said 4 P.M, already. Daniel checked his watch, although he knew perfectly well that Sasha’s computer was probably keeping time more accurately than his gold-cased wind-up Hamilton, nearly as old as he was, secured to his wrist by the latest in a long succession of classic brown cowhide straps.
He’d inherited the Hamilton along with a shoebox full of other paternal paraphernalia upon his father’s death from a heart attack when Daniel was barely out of law school and Benny Silver was still a few good years short of retirement age, whatever that would have meant to such a driven man. He’d called himself Benny, insisted on being called Benny. Ben, he had told the five-year-old Daniel, was stodgy, like a buttoned-up banker. And Benjamin, his given name, was just too Biblical. Too serious sounding . But Benny, he’d explained, struck just the right note of smarts, moxie and American sportiness. Not surprisingly, Benny had been more than a little perplexed when his son, like so many other young men in the Sixties, announced that henceforth he would be called Daniel, his full and proper name, and only Daniel. Not the middle American “Dan” like a high school football player who’d grow up to be the local Allstate Insurance agent, nor the childish Danny any more, either, as if he was still his mommy’s good little boy.
Ladies off-the-rack sportswear had been very good to Benny. Never once had he been heard to express the slightest interest in giving it all up for nothing better than frittering away his idle days haunting the golf course, steam bath and dining room of Hillcrest Country Club. It was the stress of running the business, combined with his love of a good meal, his dedicated avoidance of exercise, and the two-pack a day Pall Mall habit that had led to his collapse behind the wheel of his sky-blue Caddy convertible (the calculatedly modest Buicks having been abandoned somewhere in the course of his ascent at Coast Cuties from salesman to department manager to President) while waiting for a red light to change on Wilshire in downtown Beverly Hills during the noon rush hour. Daniel’s mother, Sylvia, now living in Boca Raton with a second husband remarkably like her first, down to the big gold Star of David nestled in his graying chest hair at the end of its heavy chain, never failed to ask him, every time he called her, if he still had the Hamilton, if he was keeping it in good running order, if he was really and truly wearing it, as his father would have wanted him to.
The three adults hovered in a semicircle around the seated Sasha. Irina stood behind him with her hands resting lightly on his shoulders, her father to her left and Daniel on her right. Sasha scrolled the Web page until the article filled the monitor. By now, the day’s heat had collected in the living room, and Daniel felt his face growing flush, felt the sweat dripping down his ribs from his armpits. He saw that the windows were swung open, saw the white drapes drawn back, but felt no breeze, no air moving. As in his own living room a floor above, an ancient air conditioning unit thrust itself out of the wall between the front door and the windows, but no one had thought to turn it on.
Along with everyone, Daniel began reading the article, straining to decipher the text and wishing he hadn’t been too vain to bring along his glasses.
Canter’s Delicatessen has seen a lot of things in its nearly fifty years on Fairfax Avenue, but never a full-scale Los Angeles Police department raid including SWAT team personnel outfitted with high-powered weapons and military-grade body armor. Not until last night, anyway.
. The popular Beverly-Fairfax district haunt for lovers of kosher style corned beef sandwiches, bagels and lox and bowls of chicken soup just like Grandma’s is open around the clock, every day of the year. At one time or another, everybody shows up at Canter’s, from elderly pensioners brooding over a piece of toast and a cup of Lipton’s tea to famished young rock musicians decompressing from their night’s gig at a nearby Hollywood club. It’s an eclectic, colorful, and generally law-abiding clientele.
“Never before have I’ seen anything like this,” said night manager Al Wexler, 46, a tall man with prematurely graying hair, shaking his head in disbelief. “Everything was perfectly normal. And then they all just burst out of those kitchen doors over there.
Mr. Wexler pointed toward the rear of the restaurant, almost at full capacity for dinnertime. “they had the guns and the LAPD jackets and the whole deal. Just like on ‘Cops.’
“Usually,” said Wexler, “whoever you are, you can count one hundred per cent on Canter’s being a nice, safe, quiet place for you and your loved ones to go out to eat. But last night we had a lot of scared customers, which I as the manager did not appreciate one little bit, let me tell you.”
The article went on to identify Marvin and Emanuel Rothko as two members of a Jewish self-defense paramilitary group based at Marvin Rothko’s home address in North Hollywood. It described the Rothko Rooter van as a specially-adapted military personnel carrier with a custom-built armor-plated body, ultra-powerful engine, bulletproof all-terrain tires and hidden compartments containing a cache of semiautomatic assault weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
According to the report, the Rothkos’ telephone conversations and emails had been secretly monitored for several years by the Department of Homeland Security, which was how their plot to detonate explosive devices planted inside a mosque near Los Angeles International Airport and in the offices of a West Los Angeles Muslim public affairs center by remote control, using cellular phones, had been uncovered. Leading to the police intervention and arrests. A third person in the situation was described only as a young man, an acquaintance of the Rothko brothers, who was held for questioning and released.
Finally, Irina removed her hands from her son’s shoulders and let her arms drop to her sides.
“A paramilitary group, Sasha? These are the friends you are making at that synagogue?”
“they’re not my friends, mom,” said Sasha. “Like I said, I didn’t even know them until something like an hour before all that.” He gestured to indicate the article, which was still onscreen.
Irina and her father said nothing. Daniel just stood there. He had no idea what to say or do, or whether it was his place to say or do anything at all.
“Sasha,” Irina said in her best maternal tone, “please turn around and look at me.” But Sasha just stared at the computer, fiddling with the mouse and making its pointer zig and zag crazily around the screen. Like a pinball, Daniel thought, recalling the flashing, jangling machines in the back of a t-shirt store on Telegraph Avenue he’d stood at, thumbing their plastic flipper buttons, when he was supposed to be sitting in some lecture hall, taking notes. This kind of truancy had cost him some problems with his grade point average, of course. But then, he’d racked up a record number of free games on Gorgol the Space Monster.
“How do you think he does it/what makes him so good?” went the line from the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” which was now playing in his head as he watched Sasha’s scurrying mouse pointer, complete with the jumping drum punctuation that came after those lines like a jabbing, exuberant exclamation point.
Suddenly, Sasha arose from his chair and faced his mother, glaring. The Who song stopped playing.
“You don’t think I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “You don’t trust me at all. Unbelievable.” With this, he pushed out of the circle between his mother and Daniel and headed for the door, snatching his black fedora from the coffee table on the way and slapping it deftly onto his head over his colorful knitted skull cap exactly as Daniel had seen him do by the mailboxes the morning before.
The apartment door slammed, and they all watched Sasha stride past the living room windows on his way toward the elevator. After a beat, Zalman went over to the couch, sat down, found the remote, and the mid-sized TV in its cabinet against the same wall as the computer station sprang to life, showing CNN. The volume came on loud at first, but Zalman immediately lowered it to a more decorous level.
Sasha had left the computer on, and Daniel, although thinking it might be better if the L. A. Times article were simply to go away now, felt it wasn’t his place to power the system down. Irina, held back by no such compunctions, leaned over the empty chair, clicked the Web browser closed, clicked again, and the computer played its familiar little four-tone goodbye melody and eventually shut itself off.
Daniel looked over at Grandpa Zalman on the couch. The older man wasn’t watching CNN, but regarding Irina and Daniel with a concerned expression. Then his eyes met Daniel’s, and he gave a little smile and a resigned shrug as if to say oh well, what can you do. Daniel arched his eyebrows and cocked his head in Irina’s direction in a Well let’s see response, then reached out and touched her upper arm, gently.
“How about we go out for a little while?” he suggested. “Just the two of us. To get some fresh air and talk. Maybe down in the courtyard by the pool?”
to be continued…