Defending the Truth, page 29
Joshua dressed in his closing argument suit the next morning. The radio on the nightstand beside the bed was on, and the seven o’clock news announcer was droning on about the weather and the war and the other things of interest to Tucsonans early in the morning.
“The Washington office of Senator William Maitland announced this morning the tragic death yesterday afternoon of the senator’s administrative aide in a hit-and-run automobile accident in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The senator called his long-time aide, Horton Landers, a patriot among patriots, a man who always put country ahead of every consideration in his life…The national weather service reports that…”
Joshua was riveted to the side of the bed, stunned, his leg in midair, putting on a shoe. He felt dizzy for a moment, then regained his equilibrium. He ran downstairs and got the morning newspaper, scanned every page for a story and found none. He turned on the radio in the kitchen and tuned to every station that had news, but they were all finished. He listened to the network that carried all-day news, but in an entire hour it didn’t say anything about Landers’s death.
It was two minutes after eight. He telephoned Roy Collins at his office.
“You hear about Landers?”
“Yep. Heard it on the radio this morning, and I got a teletype on it just a few minutes ago from the Bureau. There weren’t any witnesses. Seems Landers got loaded, was staggering across the street last night in the dark, got hit. Pity.”
“It’s Maitland and McCarthy, don’t you see? These bastards are crazy. Now they’re covering their tracks.”
“You got to be in court this morning, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Better get on your broom.” Roy hung up.
“This is the time set for the hearing of the defendants’ motions to set aside their conviction,” Judge Robert Buchanan said. “Please announce your appearances.”
“Joshua Rabb for Hanna Rabb and Jan Diedrichs, who are present, Your Honor.”
“Harry Chandler for Fred Mergen, and Diane and Deane Rustin, who are also present, Your Honor.”
“Dillan Hopkins for the government, Your Honor.”
The courtroom was empty. The morning newspaper had ignored the coming hearing, although it had been set for almost ten days. It seemed to Joshua that the publisher must have given orders to bury the whole picketing mess and the murders. If there were continued publicity, the public might begin to put two and two together and see a link among the killings, even a conspiracy.
Joshua looked around the courtroom, and there weren’t even any reporters. J. T. Sellner was either fired, on vacation, or on assignment in Borneo.
“Your motion, Mr. Rabb.” Judge Buchanan settled back in his wing chair, toying with his pocket watch in his hand.
“May it please the court, the defendants respectfully move to withdraw their pleas of guilty in this matter and to have this court dismiss the indictment of picketing and parading. It was clear at the preliminary hearing held in superior court on charges of second-degree murder that none of these defendants took part in the tragic murder of Oliver Friedkind. It has also been made clear over the preceding week that the former assistant United States attorney came under attack for what were apparently excesses and improprieties on his part in the bringing of the indictment against these five students as well as other conduct by him in his official capacity.
“I frankly admit to the court that the reason why I advised all of the defendants to enter pleas of guilty was to create a double jeopardy problem that I thought would result in the dismissal of murder charges in state court.”
The judge interrupted him. “And now that your little maneuver worked, Mr. Rabb, you come in here and say you’re sorry, but would I please undo what you did and make everything better.”
“Well, Your Honor, I wouldn’t put it exactly that way.”
“Exactly how would you put it, Mr. Rabb?”
Joshua shrugged, caught off guard. “Okay, Your Honor. Perhaps that characterization is not unwarranted.”
Buchanan chuckled. “Mr. Hopkins.”
“It is the position of the government that the interests of justice would be best served by this court granting the defendants’ motion. Therefore, we do not oppose it.”
Judge Buchanan smiled. “Very well, Mr. Hopkins. On the motion of defendants, and upon stipulation of the United States attorney, this court orders that the pleas of guilty are withdrawn, that pleas of not guilty are entered on behalf of each defendant, and that the indictment is dismissed. Anything further, gentlemen?”
Joshua was speechless. He stared at Dillan Hopkins.
“Nothing, Your Honor,” Hopkins said.
“No, Judge,” said Harry Chandler, standing.
Judge Buchanan rapped his gavel and left the bench.
Joshua walked to Dillan Hopkins. He shook his hand firmly. “I didn’t expect that,” he said.
Hopkins smiled. “So I noticed. Well, it’s about time I set some of the things straight that Essert fucked up down here.” He shook his head and frowned. “I guess I should have kept closer tabs on the son of a bitch.”
Chapter 24
Mark Goldberg woke up after less than an hour of restless sleep, groggy and disoriented, and when he tried to stand up he was disabled by the pain that radiated down his right leg. He remembered where he was and lay flat on the frozen ground, his chin on his folded arms. Overhead the wind whipped snowflakes around in eddies and slapped them onto his field jacket and steel helmet and bare neck and hands. The snow fell steadily, heavy flakes, pendulous with moisture. The frozen scabs of earth and rock that were officially Hills 894, 931, and 851, and which the marines called Heartbreak Ridge, appeared less ominous than usual under the soft white mantle.
Suddenly the artillery explosions started, as they had yesterday, as they had the day before and the day before that. He had lain here for at least a week that he could remember, and he couldn’t remember how many days before that he had been wounded. The marine assault on Heartbreak had resulted in at least seventeen hundred casualties by the time that the First Battalion of the Twenty-third Regiment finally captured the highest crest, Hill 931, on September 23.
Mark had commanded C Company ever since the captain and the two first lieutenants had been killed a week earlier in the battle for Hill 894.
The First Battalion had run out of ammunition after four hours on Hill 931, and a Chinese counterattack had overrun the marines. Mark and a dozen others had been trapped in a steep ravine below the crest of the hill and had been pinned down for day after day by the American 15mm Long Toms below and the Chinese burp gunners above.
Mark pressed his body into the snow, trying to escape from the American artillery shells exploding above him. The marines must be lobbing them from somewhere at the base of Heartbreak, he thought, since he couldn’t hear anything until the warheads whistled overhead and then impacted with earsplitting violence into the fortified bunkers carved into the rock on the top of the ridge.
After a half hour the shelling stopped. Mark felt for his backpack, buried in several inches of snow on the ground next to him. He rummaged inside it with a numb right hand and pulled out a small tin of K-rations. He had just two left. This one was a hockey puck-sized chunk of corned beef. He bit off a piece and chewed it without being able to feel his frozen lips, just the way it felt after leaving the dentist’s office with your mouth full of Novocain.
The man beside him groaned and shuddered. He was lying on his back, his face under his steel helmet. His entire torso was covered with blood from the top of his neck to his groin, and the snow had melted from the warmth of the blood and had covered him in a soft pink cloak of mush.
k ‘Hey, Simmons, you holding on?” Mark said with difficulty through his unmoving lips, his voice weak and hollow in the swirling snow. There was no answer. Mark called out again, but Simmons couldn’t even elicit the grunts that he had been able to muster moments before.
The other eleven marines in the ravine were equally still and silent. Maybe he was the only one still alive, he thought. The others had bled to death or frozen to death. Suddenly he wanted to cry, but his face was too numb and he had no tears. He had to get warm, but he could hardly move anymore. Think about Hanna, that’ll make me warm, he thought.
“Hanna,” he whispered into the snow. He tried to feel the touch of her skin on his, her belly pressing against his, her breasts on his chest. But it was surreal, here in the blizzard on a rock in Korea, and he couldn’t conjure up a warming image or memory that lasted more than a second. And all of the images, her face, her body, their bodies melded together, all of them cascaded into one another and shattered in fluffy white snowy explosions in his mind’s eye, and he fought to remain conscious and not to become totally numb and freeze to death. He tried to stand up, but the combination of the pain and the cold paralyzed him. His mind grasped nothing. The images melted in a bright orange flame. He felt weirdly warm and cozy, and suddenly from somewhere he began to murmur the prayer that a person must say before dying: “Sh’ma Yisroel Adonshem Elokeynu Adonshem echad [Hear O Isreal, the Lord is our God, the one and only God.]”
He heard sounds of firing, burp guns, M-ls, several Browning automatic rifles. They interrupted his warmth and comfort, and he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The noise grew louder, and screams and shouts in Chinese or Korean were getting closer.
It was a huge, painful effort for him, but he managed to roll onto his side. Pains like a white-hot knife lanced through his left leg. His hands were almost completely numb, and he could hardly feel the Thompson submachine gun that was by his side. He saw several small men on the ridge above him, outlined in their quilted uniforms against the tarnished pewter sky. They were firing toward him and his men. He worked his trigger finger into the housing of the Thompson and lifted its barrel toward the ridge. With an immense effort of will that he never had before, never knew he had, he managed to flex his finger and pull the trigger. Three men on the ridge fell immediately.
There was firing behind Mark, but he was too stiff and numb to turn his head to see. The exertion of turning his body and firing the Thompson had exhausted him, and he drifted into unconsciousness.
There are nineteen army nurses here at the army hospital near Pusan, and several of them are sort of attractive. But they are all beautiful to the injured, lonely men to whom they minister, and they are as lonely as the men. Romances blossom and wilt regularly. The nurses are all officers and forbidden from fraternizing with the four hundred enlisted men, so the hospitalized officers are well attended to. At night Mark sometimes hears groans and gasps and other obvious sounds from behind the privacy curtains that can be pulled to surround the cots.
After about two weeks his leg is released from traction. He begins to take the shape of a man to the nurses. One of them in particular, a brown-haired, amber-eyed, willowy thirty-year-old captain from Alabama, lingers by his cot a little longer than her functions require. She isn’t very pretty, he knows, but in here, with the war raging just a few miles to the north, she is as seductive and sumptuous as Marilyn Monroe.
The doctor has just taken Mark’s catheter out, but he can’t get out of bed to go to the latrine yet. So Nora puts the bedpan under the sheet, and she keeps her hand there and softly massages his swollen, sore penis and helps him adjust it to point into the pan between his legs. He is grateful for her kindness and special attention and embarrassed that he cannot pee. It takes almost an hour for his bladder and whatever muscles and sphincters and nerves have to be awakened to come to life, and finally he does. It is a monumental victory for both Nora and him, and she gives him a joyful peck on the cheek, sweeps back the privacy curtain, and carries the bedpan triumphantly to the latrine at the end of the wardroom.
The captain who stepped on a land mine and has no feet, in the bed next to Mark’s, claps softly. I guess you’re Nora’s new friend, he says.
Mark is in pain from the exercise of peeing in the bedpan, and he struggles onto his side away from the captain’s leer.
Mark awakens in darkness, his privacy curtain drawn again, and feels a hand under the sheet reaching for him.
Feeling better now? Nora whispers. She pulls the sheet away.
Time and rest have restored him, and her gentle ministrations arouse him. He knows that he should say no, no, I have a girlfriend at home and I must not cheat on her, but no such utterances emerge from his mouth. The only sounds from him, as she wraps her lips around him and her tongue massages, emulate the groans that he has heard from behind other curtains.
Days go by, and nights, and he looks forward to the attention of Nora from Alabama, and if he feels any remorse or chagrin for cheating on Hanna, it is embalmed and interred by his excruciating loneliness and need for the female contact that Nora provides. There is nothing to do in the hospital and nowhere to go since he is bedridden from a bullet wound in his left leg. The hospital’s library consists of a volume of Hemingway short stories and a Gideon Bible. He reads the stories through several times until he can read them no more, and then he starts on the Bible.
He reads it from the beginning, the creation of man and woman, to the very end, the last chapter of Revelation, where it says, “And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst, Come.” He is athirst, and he does exactly as Revelation tells him to, with Nora’s help. And he begins to heal quickly now.
Then one day the doctor sits down on the field chair next to his bed and tells him that what at first looked like a crippling wound that would get him out of Korea and back to the States has luckily turned out to be quite minor, and he will recover without anything but a two-inch scar. So he’s not being sent home, but at least he won’t be sent back to a combat outfit. Instead, he is going to light duty. He will report in two days to Koje Island as adjutant to the commander of the third logistical command, in charge of the prisoners of war being held by the United Nations on the once-picturesque island of fishermen and farmers.
Mark suddenly feels guilty. He has cheated on Hanna. Why does the shame overwhelm him only now and not weeks ago? He doesn’t know. It is simply so. He writes her a letter. It is the first letter that he has written to her since coming to the hospital. He supposes that the marines have long ago notified her that he was wounded and is now recovering.
Nora comes to his bed again that night, to share herself with him, to console them both for their loneliness, and he turns his face from her and pushes her searching hands away. She creeps guiltily away. In the morning, a new nurse comes to minister to him.
Chapter 25
Mischa Livinsky’s trial begins tomorrow. In the evening, Joshua goes to visit Barbara in the hospital. She still can’t come home, the doctor tells him. The hemorrhaging has started again. Not serious, no, nothing to worry about. But she has to stay off her feet awhile more.
Barbara is a little dizzy and nauseated. She doesn’t know why. The doctor just tells her that time will heal her. Have patience, wait. But she is impatient, her husband must go to court tomorrow, and he is always uneasy the night before. He needs to be comforted, to be with her. She wants to be with him, and she cries.
Her father and mother come to visit. Rebecca is worried about Barbara, and she knows that Joshua is also deeply worried. It is not his fault that this happened. He is a good man, this Joshua. Not so practical, maybe, not such a great provider, but a mensch. But Hal is still stiff toward Joshua, not the warm, joke-telling, back-slapping pal he had always been. He is gloomy, seeing his only child this way, he is depressed and bitter.
“Don Quixote,” he snorts, looking at Joshua. “At windmills, you keep charging. At windmills.”
“No, at bad guys,” Joshua mumbles. “Otherwise who will ever do a thing about them? They ride around in limousines and make speeches about the American way and truth and justice, and people cheer and call them great patriots.”
“Go home, go to sleep, honey,” Barbara says. “Try to get some rest.”
“They make Tim Essert the scapegoat for everything and kill him, and then they kill the guy who killed him. They’re worse than the Mafia. Joe Bonanno has more honor than that.”
Joshua stands up and goes to the window, staring into the pitch-black night.
“And the guy who’s innocent of everything will get convicted,” he murmurs. “And I can’t do a damn thing about it.”
He goes home a little after Barbara’s parents leave. He forces himself to listen to the “Dinah Shore Show with Harry James and Johnny Mercer” and then tries to absorb himself in “Mr. and Mrs. North,” “The Adventures of the Thin Man,” and “Meet Corliss Archer,” until the radio goes to static. He wants to lose himself in the shows, distract his attention from what will start tomorrow. But it doesn’t work. There will be no sleep for him tonight, no escape from the feeling of tragedy that enshrouds him.
It is October 17, 1951.
The armistice talks in Panmunjom are stalled, as usual. The United States sends twenty-five thousand young soldiers to Korea every month, month after month, and still there is no victory over the North Koreans and the Red Chinese.
Some French guy with an unpronounceable and un-spellable name has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Peace. Who he is and what he did is a general mystery to everyone in America. And with the war going on in the Far East and the Soviet Union looking like it’s about to invade Europe, it doesn’t seem as though this French guy has achieved much of anything. But who knows.
Senator Joseph “Tail Gunner” McCarthy and his right-hand man, Senator William “Big Bill” Maitland, are on the warpath again in Washington, D.C., but this war is against Americans. They have unearthed a despicable homosexual at the State Department whose vile unnaturalness has led him to sell government secrets to Moscow. They have not revealed his name yet, because they don’t want to scare away his co-conspirators. They are certain that there is an entire coven of these closet queers who have sold out their country to dance to Moscow’s tune.
