Establishment Read online

  Goodman paused over a fork of spaghetti, a hurt look on his round face. “I’m listening.”

  “And this guy who has the planes,” Brodsky went on. “He’s some kind of nut. He says he has an offer from a South American airline to buy the planes for a quarter of a million, but he wants to sell to us because God told him that until the Jews return to the promised land, there’ll be no peace on earth. That’s what he says. Me, I think he can’t get an export license, and I’m not even sure of how he got hold of the planes. There is plenty of hanky-panky in this war surplus stuff.”

  “Did you see the planes?” Bernie asked.

  “We saw them. Herbie here thinks they’re O.K.”

  “Are you a pilot?”

  “Navigator,” Herbie replied. “I was with the Tenth Air Force.”

  “And what about an export license? Can you get one?”

  “Hell, no,” Brodsky said. “This whole thing is illegal. If just a smell of it gets out, we’re cooked.”

  “Then how in hell do you expect to get the planes out of the country?”

  “Simple. We fly them out. We got a guy in Bakersfield who deals in aviation gasoline, and he says he can get us the trucks to fuel them. He’s Jewish, and he’s willing to stake us to the fuel. We got another guy in New Jersey, name of Schullman, who runs an airfield for private planes and freighters. He’s willing to look the other way. We fly the planes cross-country and try to match the commercial airlines, land in New Jersey, refuel, and take off.”

  “For where?”

  “We don’t know yet. But we got guys in New York working on it.”

  “I guess you realize what a harebrained scheme this whole thing is,” Bernie said.

  “Sure. But what the hell. Everything we do in Palestine is either harebrained or impossible. So we do it. We can muster maybe forty thousand men in the Haganah. We can’t even arm all of them. We don’t have one plane that’s worth talking about. And any day now, we’re going to be facing a hundred and fifty thousand Arab troops, real armies with tanks and guns and planes. Do you understand how much we need a guy like you, Bernie. From what I hear, you were one of the best weapons men the British had in Africa—”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Sure. Still, you know your stuff. You got a command personality. You could hold this crew in line—”

  “Can it. I’ll go.”

  “Bernie, thanks. Now about the money?”

  “I’ll try. The thing I don’t understand is, why can’t you go to regular sources? There are plenty of wealthy Jews here and in Los Angeles. They’ll give.”

  “Will they, Bernie? You can’t report this kind of money. You can’t claim a deduction. Getting the two million in New York was like pulling teeth out of granite. It took seven months. We can’t involve any of the fund-raisers who raise money for Palestine. We can’t take chances on questions being asked. It’s not simple, and our time is running out.”

  ***

  Jean Whittier, Barbara’s mother, had begun life as Jean Seldon, whose father, Thomas Seldon, had founded the Seldon Bank, which already had sixteen branches in California. In the state, the Seldon Bank was second only to the giant Bank of America. Control of the bank had passed to her son, Thomas, and at this time Jean was living in a rather placid sort of unmarried sinfulness with her first husband, Dan Lavette. The legalistic complications caused her to retain the name of Whittier, her previous husband; as she put it, it would have been rather pointless to live unmarried with a man whose name was identical with her own. She and Dan made their residence in the top floor of the house on Russian Hill that Dan had built for her thirty-five years before, soon after their marriage. Jean had converted the ground floor into the gallery through which she was none too successfully attempting to bring to the citizens of San Francisco an appreciation of modern art. Just now, in the gallery, the doors temporarily closed to the public, Jean had forgathered with Eloise and Adam Levy, her daughter, Barbara, and on Barbara’s lap her grandson, Sam, who was determinedly attempting to destroy his thumb with his eight rudimentary teeth.

  “I would give him a pacifier,” Jean was saying. “I don’t think all that is good for his thumb.”

  “I know, mother,” Barbara said. “I forgot it. I dashed out of the house, wondering what awful thing had transpired.”

  “It is awful,” Eloise said. “It’s dreadful.”

  “I don’t think it’s dreadful at all. Two FBI men were asking about me. The way things are today, with everyone seeing communists behind every bush and wall, they must be asking questions about thousands and thousands of people. It’s what they’re paid for. I only wish Jake hadn’t been so high-handed with them. Then you might have found out what they were after.”

  “Jake is Jake,” Adam said. “I was pretty damn angry myself. It’s the whole look and attitude of them. They’re such cold, malignant bastards. And why Eloise? Why do they come to her?”

  “Probably because it’s easier to bully a woman than a man,” Barbara decided.

  “Could it have had something to do with Bernie?” Jean wondered.

  “Why Bernie?”

  “Well, I only mean he has that kind of a past, hasn’t he? Spain, Palestine, smuggling, then the British army. I never did understand what he did during those years.”

  “He did what most people were doing. He fought fascism.”

  “Which is not exactly popular these days.”

  “I think you are all making too much of this. I have nothing to hide and nothing to conceal,” Barbara said firmly—asking herself at the same time whether there was any truth in her statement. In fact, she had a good deal to conceal, and she was not very good at dissembling. It was close to lunchtime, and Jean suggested that Adam take Eloise to have seafood on the wharf and that they both take the afternoon in town.

  When Barbara rose to go, Jean said, “I’d rather you remained. I have oatmeal and applesauce and all sorts of things to feed Sam, and you and I will talk.”

  “I’d rather not, mother.”

  “I’d rather you would.”

  Barbara sighed and nodded. Adam and Eloise left. “You’re very arrogant, mother,” Barbara said. “You order people around. You tell them what to do and where to go, and you treat grown folk like children.”

  “I know. At the same time, we’re going to talk. I know you very well, my dear, and I’m not going to lie awake wondering what’s happening in your life.”

  “You never have.”

  “That’s as it may be. Suppose we put together some lunch for your son.”

  While she fed Sam, Barbara told Jean what had happened between her and Bernie. “I’m trusting you,” Barbara said. “It’s no matter-of-fact thing to trust one’s mother with stuff like this. I do trust you. They would be in terrible trouble if this got out.”

  “And you think that’s why the FBI was asking about you?”

  “No, I don’t. It’s just too soon, and if they were, why wouldn’t they ask about Bernie instead of me?”

  “I don’t know. Bobby,” Jean said, “what does it all add up to? Does he want to leave you? Is this crazy scheme an excuse?”

  “Anything would be an excuse. It isn’t that he doesn’t love me. I think he loves me as much as he could love anyone. He’s as gentle as a lamb, and you watch him playing with Sammy and you say to yourself, what a happy, darling man—and content. No, he’s not content. He’s eating out his heart.”

  “For what? To be in Palestine?”

  “That could be what he tells himself. But it’s not that. It’s to be free, to run after that macho image of a big, heroic man. Oh, maybe not. I don’t really know what tortures his soul. He once asked me why I kept publishing my books under the name of Barbara Lavette. Was I ashamed of the name of Cohen? Can you imagine? I tried to make him understand that a writer’s name is like a trademark, a record of the wo
rk she has done. But the plain fact is that we live on the money I earn. He’s so aware of that. Every cent the garage makes goes to paying off his loans and paying the mortgage fees, and he is damn well aware that I clean the house and cook the meals and take care of Sammy and do my own writing as well.”

  “And how you do it, I can’t for the life of me imagine.”

  “It’s no great problem. I have enough time. But I know what it does to him. I’ve watched the marriage going to pieces for months, and it breaks my heart. He’s not cruel or nasty or vicious. He’s just dying inside himself, and it’s my fault because if I had had an ounce of common sense, I wouldn’t have married him. The funny part of it is that I love him so much, almost the way I love Sammy, the way you love a child. You don’t know a man until you’re in bed with him, and then you know him the way no one else does. And you know, if I plead with him enough I can stop him, I can keep him from going.”

  “Will you?”

  Tears welling into her eyes, Barbara shook her head. “No. That would do no good. That would only destroy both of us.”

  “Will he come back?”

  “If he lives—yes. He’ll come back. He thinks he’s indestructible. In all those years of war, he was never wounded, never scratched. But that—”

  Sammy saw the tears and reacted to the tone of voice, and he began to cry. Jean took him in her arms, and Barbara went to the bathroom and washed her face. When she returned, Jean said, “There’s still the money. That must be one of the reasons they came to him. Where could he find a hundred and ten thousand dollars?”

  “I think,” Barbara said, “I think he’ll go to daddy. Would daddy give it to him?”

  Jean thought about it for a while. “He might. He just might. I’ve long ago given up trying to anticipate what Dan Lavette might do.”

  ***

  Newspapermen who interviewed Dan Lavette frequently described him as leonine. The term amused him. A man is inside himself, and unless he is an actor or a politician, he rarely knows the image he presents to the outside world. It might be said that he generally knows even less concerning his inner self. Long ago, before Dan Lavette’s Chinese wife, May Ling, died, he had moments when he felt himself and knew himself at least to some degree, and in those moments he had never seen himself as or considered himself a lionlike character. If anything, he had been as bewildered and confused as the next man. Yet it was quite true that now, in his sixtieth year, he might be described as leonine. He was a large man, six feet two inches in height, and over the past few years he had put on weight. His thick, curly hair had turned white, his face and neck had become heavier, and when he tightened his belt it creased the beginnings of a paunch.

  He had become a legend in the Bay Area. When columnists were at a loss for a subject, there was always gold to be mined out of Dan Lavette. They could go back to his boyhood, when he ran his crabbing boats out of Fisherman’s Wharf and fought the fish pirates with a double-barreled shotgun, or to the financial empire he had built with his partner, Mark Levy, before the Great Depression, or to his marriage to Jean Seldon, or to his divorce and his subsequent marriage to May Ling, or to his years of poverty when he fished mackerel out of San Pedro, or to the incredible shipyard he had built during the war years on Terminal Island. It was all grist for their mills, and the enticing thing about Lavette was that he never ceased to make good copy. He and his former wife, Jean, scorned to disguise that they were living together, a condition still regarded with censure in 1948. He operated a fleet of tankers that already held a commanding position in the trade, and, true to form, he made the headquarters of his shipping company in Jack London Square in Oakland. The fact that his son, Thomas—to whom he had not spoken for years—was in partnership with Jean’s ex-husband, John Whittier, operating the largest cargo fleet on the West Coast, only made the copy more intriguing.

  That Bernie Cohen came to him was not solely dependent on their relationship. If there had been no relationship at all and if Cohen had asked for the one man in the Bay Area who might respond to the strange scheme in which he was involved, he surely would have been recommended to Lavette. Now he sat in Dan’s office, listening uneasily as Dan said, “I have to get my bearings, Bernie. You’re married to my daughter for two years, and you’ve never asked for a nickel, breaking your ass with that damn garage of yours, and now it’s a hundred and ten thousand dollars. I almost like it. Is there any chance of seeing any of that money again?”

  “Not much, no. I could give you a note, and Brodsky could sign it as a representative of the Haganah, but I’d be a liar if I said there was any chance of them repaying it.”

  “So it’s charity.”

  “Not deductible.”

  “Just to sweeten it. You’re a strange man, Bernie, but you’re not crazy. At least, not much crazier than most of us. What in hell ever gave you the notion that I’d go for this?”

  “Desperation. There’s nowhere else to go.”

  “You don’t think I owe you something because you married my daughter?”

  “I’m the one who owes you. No.”

  “And you’re walking out on her for a month, two months, six months. Does she know that?”

  “She knows.”

  “Does she like it?”

  “What do you think, Dan? No, she doesn’t like it. But she won’t tell me not to do it.”

  “What about the garage?”

  “Gomez, my foreman, he’s a good man. I can trust him. He’ll run the garage. If we get the planes and if everything goes according to schedule, I could be back in three weeks.”

  “You don’t really believe that?”

  Bernie shrugged. “No, not really. It could take a few months.”

  Dan reached into a drawer and took out a box of cigars. “Smoke? These are clear Havana.” Bernie shook his head. Dan clipped the end and lit the cigar. “Ten C-54s for one hundred and ten thousand. This is a demented world we live in, Bernie. Ford’s Willow Run plant cost the government five million and better. They sold it off as war surplus, and someone walked in and bought it for seventy thousand dollars. A part of the plant was filled with cases of sterling silver screws; they were worth ten times what he paid for the plant. No one knew it. I started the first airline out here on the Coast. That was back in twenty-eight. We flew Ford trimotors—tin geese, they called them. One of them cost more than these ten C-54s. By the way, what makes you think they’re in any condition to fly?”

  “They checked them out.”

  “I think the whole scheme is totally insane. I don’t know whether Barbara ever told you how I feel about war. I made two fortunes out of two wars. It’s the filthiest, bloodiest, stupidest rotten game man ever invented. There are no good guys and no bad guys. It’s a lousy, rotten scam.”

  “Sure,” Bernie said softly. “I won’t argue. I lived in it ten years of my life. What should we do, Dan? Let ourselves be slaughtered? Being a Jew is a unique thing. Other victims are picked at random. We’re chosen specifically. Without these planes, the Arabs will slaughter us. Hitler killed six million of us. Doesn’t it have to end somewhere? There’s just no other way in the world to get fighter planes into Palestine.” He shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m dumping all this on you. You’re not Jewish.”

  “I’m not. That’s true. And let me tell you something, Bernie. If I should take leave of my senses and give you this money, it’s not for you or your cause. I don’t believe in causes. I’m a hard, cynical businessman, without a bone of idealism in my body, but I had a partner once who was the closest thing to a brother I ever had. Closer. His name was Mark Levy, and I guess maybe Barbara told you about him. He was Jewish, and I have a very large tab that he never collected. I owe him. Maybe this is a way to close a debt to a dead man; maybe it isn’t. Let me think about it.”

  “Our time’s running out, Dan.”

  “I’ll let you know tomorrow.” />
  After Cohen had left, Dan sat and brooded and stared at the smoke of his cigar. Then he pressed his intercom and asked his secretary to send in Stephan Cassala. Cassala was the son of Anthony Cassala, who founded the Bank of Sonoma soon after the 1906 earthquake and watched it go under in 1929. Anthony died soon after the collapse of his bank. Stephan, at fifty-three, was now vice president and general manager of Lavette Shipping.

  “Steve,” Dan said, “sit down and think about this.” Stephan dropped into a leather armchair facing Dan. He was a tall, slender, dark man, with deepset eyes and a long, brooding face. “Suppose I were to ask you,” Dan went on, “to get me a hundred and ten thousand in cash and not have any record of it. Lose it. Could you do it?”

  “You don’t want to tell me what you need it for?”

  “No.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy. Our cash position is not great.”

  “What do you draw cash for?”

  “Expenses, some bonuses, dock guards on short notice, and bribes. Mostly bribes. You know that, Dan.”

  “How do you cover the bribes?”

  “We lose it. Juggle it—a little here, a little there. But a hundred and ten thousand will take a lot of juggling.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “If you need the money, I can do it.” He stared at Dan worriedly. “Are you being blackmailed?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not paying off? I heard rumors of the Mob beginning to operate here in Oakland. Dan, if you pay off, there’s no end to it.”

  “I’m not paying off.”

  “I’m curious as hell.”

  “Then stay curious, Steve. If you don’t know what it’s for, then someday you can swear under oath that you never knew.”

  “That way? Jesus, I don’t like it, Dan.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s all in a good cause. Or so they tell me.”

  At eleven o’clock the following morning, Dan Lavette, carrying a bulging briefcase, rang the doorbell of his daughter’s house. Barbara opened the door, looked at him in amazement, and then embraced him. “Daddy, what a delicious surprise!”