Ned Blanchett was a former ranch foreman and skilled sharpshooter. He had been recruited onto Jaxon’s team, and having never worked for a government agency before, he was an “unknown” in spy circles. And although Lucy wasn’t allowed to tell her parents about their work, there were indications that some of it took them overseas into dangerous situations.
Apparently, from Lucy’s hints, Ned was on such a mission now and she didn’t know when he would be coming back.
Marlene had tried to console her. “Ned’s pretty tough, baby. Ever since he got hooked up with this crazy family, he’s come through time after time in some terrible situations. He can take care of himself.”
“Until something happens he can’t take care of,” Lucy retorted. “He’s not Superman, Mom… he’s not faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, or able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. He can be killed, and for that matter, so can I, though he’s in harm’s way more than I am.”
Marlene didn’t quite know how to answer that. And it was clear that her daughter wanted to talk, not debate.
Lucy went on. “But it’s not just that. We’re both dedicated to what we’re doing with Espey. We’re willing to take the risks because we think it’s important for our country and the people we love. But the only reason I see to get married is to provide that stability for children. Ned and I don’t need a ceremony or a piece of paper to know that we’re each other’s soul mates. But who can justify having kids these days? The world is crazy-lunatics trying to blow up subway cars filled with innocent people, including children; unstable fanatical governments racing to create nuclear weapons and thumbing their nose at the international community that says they can’t; self-serving and myopic politicians who would rather see us all go down in flames than work together for the common good.”
Lucy had gone on for quite a while, but then she’d clammed up and didn’t want to talk about it. She just lay around the loft reading books, hanging out with her family, going for walks, and avoiding serious conversations. Several times, Marlene had caught her crying, only to have her say again that she didn’t want to discuss the wedding or Ned. “Not now. I need to think.”
However, she’d appeared to be ready to talk again as they sat on the couch waiting for the Sobelmans. But the moment passed with the buzzing from the security gate.
Marlene crossed to the door and looked up at the small security monitor. As expected, an elderly couple stood on the steps leading up from the sidewalk on Crosby Street and was smiling pleasantly at the camera. She pressed a button to unlock the gate and spoke into the intercom. “Moishe, Goldie, welcome! You remember we’re on the fifth floor. We’ll be waiting.”
Butch had joined her at the door by the time the elevator across the hall opened to reveal the Sobelmans. They were a cute couple. Neither was much over five feet tall, though the man had a couple of inches on his wife. He had gray eyes and a full head of kinky gray hair that looked like steel wool with two large ears protruding from it; her curly hair was ginger colored and framed an elfin face with merry blue eyes. Although they were both in their eighties, they were still spry and stepped lightly out of the elevator to hug their hosts.
Moishe was holding a bag from their bakery on the corner of Third Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street, Il Buon Pane. “You need me to take that for you,” Butch said, reaching for the bag. But Moishe pulled it away from his reach.
“Not so fast, my friend,” he said. “I want to make sure this arrives in the kitchen safe and unmolested.”
“Then come in, come in,” Marlene said, laughing as her husband chuckled and beamed at their guests.
The Sobelmans entered the living room, where they met Lucy and were soon joined by the twins. As they all greeted one another, Moishe surrendered his jacket to Butch, but Goldie kept hers on. The women were going to a new impressionist exhibit at the Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue while “the men” talked.
As the women prepared to leave, Moishe’s hands made the sign language symbols for “I love you” to his wife. Also a concentration camp survivor who had been “experimented on” by Nazi doctors, Goldie had not spoken for more than sixty years, although there was nothing physically wrong with her. She had said her first words in that time only recently, as the assassin Nadya Malovo prepared to shoot Moishe-part of her plan to exact revenge on Butch Karp. “Please, child,” she’d begged Malovo, her voice hardly more than a whisper from the self-imposed silence. “If you must shoot, then I beg you, me first. I cannot stand to see him hurt.”
Although Butch later told Marlene that the last thing he would have expected from Malovo was mercy, the assassin had not shot. In hot pursuit, U.S. Marshal Jen Capers entered the bakery at that moment with her nine-millimeter pointed at Malovo’s head. Although Malovo considered taking out Capers and the Sobelmans in what might have resulted in death to all, she instead gave herself up. Capers, who had lost a partner to Malovo’s treachery, then escorted Malovo to a federal lockup to await trial.
They had all wondered if having spoken once, Goldie would now continue. But she reverted back to silence and communicated through sign language, which was part of the reason Lucy was going on the excursion. A polyglot who spoke more than sixty languages fluently and parts of a couple dozen more, she was also a master of sign language.
I love you, too, Goldie signed back to Moishe. Try to be good.
I’ll do my best, Moishe signed back with a smile as Lucy translated for the others.
When the door closed behind the women, Karp turned to Moishe. “Why don’t we set up around the kitchen table if that’s okay with you? I think the boys want to record this.”
Moishe nodded and held up the bag. “But first we celebrate life’s pleasures.”
The little old man winked at Karp, who laughed. He’d already caught the scent of Sobelman’s specialty, cherry cheese coffee cake, which he deemed to be the best in the five boroughs, and that probably meant the rest of the civilized world, too. “I’ll fetch the plates; boys, you get the forks,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “And make it snappy, my stomach is doing handsprings.”
It was a half hour later when the four pushed back from the table with contented sighs and full bellies. With reluctance all around, they turned to the darker issue at hand.
“So, I understand you want me to talk to you about the Sonderkommandos,” Moishe said, looking from one twin to the other. The boys nodded. “I will warn you that this will not be an easy story to tell or to listen to; it may even give you nightmares. But I will tell you the truth because I believe every young Jew should hear it before his bar mitzvah.”
The old man paused. “Tell me first, what is the significance of the bar mitzvah?”
“Isn’t it the rite of passage for Jewish males from childhood?” Giancarlo said.
“And from that point on, we’ll be considered men,” Zak added.
Moishe smiled. “No ceremony creates a man from a boy,” he said. “A man is defined by his actions. But that is the definition most people would give. However, as your rabbi will undoubtedly tell you out at some point, a bar mitzvah marks the time when a Jewish male is morally responsible for his actions. And in a sense, perhaps, your definition is apt, as to be a man, one must be morally responsible.”
Moishe took a sip of coffee. “Myself and my family and friends had just celebrated my bar mitzvah in our little town outside of Amsterdam, where my father was a baker, when our world changed forever. For many generations, we Jews were welcome in the Netherlands; indeed, Christian Dutch welcomed twenty-five thousand German Jews who fled their native land ahead of the coming storm in the late 1930s. We thought we were safe.
“Even when stories began circulating that Jews in Germany were being rounded up and shipped off to ‘relocation camps,’ as the Nazis so euphemistically called them, we still felt safe.”