He sat back down with a thump, dropping his head to the table. Reuben did an about-face, running thankfully back to Levi.
“You don’t look well, dear,” she said a bit too loudly. “I’d better get you back to the boat.”
She dragged him to their dinghy.
“Goodbye, Mrs. Babinsky,” Reuben shouted to the woman, still standing at her table, who’d watched this scenario in shocked silence. “Good to see you again.”
“Good to see you, Debbie. I never see yaw motha anymaw since we moved to Syosset but if I run inta her at the mall I’ll tell her I saw you hee-yah.”
Please don’t do that, Reuben prayed to herself. I’m ready to deal with the United States Coast Guard or even the Egyptian Navy if I have to. But please don’t start my mother looking for me.
The last email Reuben sent to her mother from Spain hinted vaguely at a long trip through Europe with a “very interesting man I just met, more later.”
“Thanks,” Reuben said to Levi as they arrived at the Hinckley waiting quietly at anchor for them. “That was quick thinking.”
The incident evaporated any trace of Jamaican rum from her brain. Reuben was back to all business.
“Let’s get out of here right now, before they decide to drop by for a visit to see how my husband is doing so they can gossip about the lush I married.”
Levi stood at the boat’s bow, his foot holding down the button that operated the electric anchor windlass as the anchor chain noisily wound up from the water and down into its storage locker in the boat’s bow.
“Anchor’s up. Let’s go,” he shouted to Reuben, standing at the wheel. She pushed the engine shifter forward, engaging the gears and driving the boat forward around the point of the harbor entrance.
“What’s our course,” she asked. “Find us a course well clear of everybody, and far away from Long Island, New York.”
“Swing us north, due north,” Levi said, climbing out of the cabin into the boat’s cockpit. “Eight-hundred-and-twenty-two”—he stuck his head into the cabin for a second glance at the GPS—“point three miles due north is Bermuda. We’ll head that way and decide what to do before we get there. We can’t risk any more chance meetings with ladies from Long Island.”
He raised the main and mizzen sails, unrolled the genoa jib, and the boat heeled over in the warm trade wind breeze. Levi connected the autopilot, dialed in the heading and sat back in the cockpit.
Two days later, as the boat continued to sail under blue skies before moderate trade winds, Levi climbed up the ladder from the cabin, where he’d been perched at the chart table working with the computerized plotter for most of the past two hours.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he told Reuben, who was stretched on one of the cockpit benches as the autopilot steered the sailboat. “We’re going to sail one straight shot up the whole East Coast, no stops, no islands. I’ve plotted a course that takes us past Bermuda. From Bermuda we’ll sail due north and land somewhere on the American northeast coast. This will take us two weeks of straight night-and-day sailing. We’ll be staying out of the shipping lanes on most of this course.”
“You’re the great sailor, buddy. I don’t care how you do it. Just get us there,” Reuben responded.
“I’ll get us there all right,” he answered. “But what happens then? When do you fill me in on your plans for that deadly toy we have hidden away? Even after what happened at home, I have limits as to what I’m willing to do.” Levi laughed nervously. “I won’t blow up New York City, you know.”
“Blow up Noo Yawk?” Reuben laughed too, putting on her best Long Island voice. “Blow up Bloomies? Blow up the Central Pok Zoo? Blow up, oh my God, Saks Fifth Ave-a-noo? I may be desperate, may be a bit crazy, but I’m not sick.”
She dropped the accent.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do when we get to shore,” she said. “I’m hoping there will be people there—Jews, American Jews—who’ll take us in, take that thing off our hands. I don’t want to have to decide what to do with it.”
She paused, her eyes taking on a faraway look.
“I did enough during those days in the desert. If what I’ve done becomes known, I’ve already earned a dark place in the history books. I expect millions of people hate me already.”
Nobody had ever hated her before.
She stopped speaking suddenly; her eyes clouded, her breath stopped, her shoulders shook. Levi looked at the woman, opened his arms wide, and she flung herself against his chest, sobbing. His arms surrounded her, pulling her close, tight against his chest, as her body shook with her heaving sobs.
After several minutes with no words exchanged, Reuben pulled back and looked Levi in the face. She spoke quietly.
“I’m a mass murderer. I am, right? I sent that bomb to Damascus. A billion Muslims believe if they kill me they go straight to heaven. Right?”
Levi did not respond. She made a fist and pounded on his chest.
“Right? Right? They kill me and they go to Paradise. I know that, at least I know they think that. Why do you think I stay awake all night and drink myself unconscious all day? I don’t know what we are going to do with that thing.” She pointed into the cabin. “I don’t know what we’ll do with it. But it’s the property of the State of Israel—the property now, I guess, of the Jewish people. It’s better to still have it than to have lost it to the fucking Arabs, right?”
She looked at him, waiting for a response. He nodded, barely moving his head. That wasn’t enough for her, he sensed. He spoke up, in a whisper first, then repeating himself firmly.
“You did the right thing, Debbie. You followed orders. You had no choice. And this one”—he nodded toward the boat’s cabin—“this one will be somebody else’s choice. We’ll hand it over and be done with it. We won’t do anything stupid with it.”
His words comforted her, whether or not he believed what he was telling her. Reassured, she smiled at Levi. “New York? Blow up Lord and Taylor? My mother would kill me. She’d have to go naked the rest of her life.”
The autopilot whirred as Levi loosened the main sheet to ease the sail as the wind veered slightly. They sailed onward toward New England, the three of them: the last sailor in the Israeli Navy, the last member of the Israeli government, and the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of the (former) State of Israel.
CHAPTER 12
Harry, we can’t say no,” Myrna Blumberg had shrieked after hanging up the telephone at two in the morning. “Everybody is taking them. We can’t be the only ones to say no.”
“Myrna, they’re criminals. It’s against the law to hide them. We’ll get arrested,” Harry, her husband, begged.
“Arrested shmested. What are they going to do, arrest every family on the block? Harry, do you want to be the only family at synagogue to say no? I’d be so ashamed. Besides, they said it’s only for a day or two until something more permanent comes up.”
The decision was made the way most decisions in the Blumberg family were made. Harry never actually agreed to take the Gorinskis into their house. He’d just stopped saying no.
The Gorinskis—father Oleg, mother Karin, and daughters Olga and Petka—were a nice enough family. They’d been in Israel all of two years after moving from Moscow. Oleg was a computer programmer who was fortunate to have obtained Russian exit visas for his family, since he worked on air defense radar software. He quickly found work with an Israeli electronics business. The two daughters were excited to be in America, where they wanted to move in the first place, but were most excited about finally getting off that horrible, stinking ship. They fought over who would get the first bath in the Blumbergs’jacuzzi.