Exile: a novel (28 page)

The head of the federal public defender’s office sounded annoyed to be called at home on a Saturday afternoon. “Isn’t that what your office is for?” David asked.

“In theory. But there’s some up-front ethical problems, a potential conflict of interest. We’re already representing Ibrahim Jefar, the chief witness against Hana Arif. Even if Arif chose to waive a conflict, a judge might bar us from representing her.” Levin’s tone was blunt. “Frankly, David, that would be a favor to us, and to her. We’re overwhelmed as it is: too many cases, too few lawyers, way too small a budget. I’d only take this case if someone made us—unless Arif chooses to plead guilty, we can’t give her anything close to what she’s going to need. They’re arraigning her on Monday, right?”

“Right.”

“Then the best I can hope for, in the interests of all, is that someone else is standing next to her.”

With that, the chief federal public defender went back to playing with his kids.

10     
T
hat evening, after placing three more calls to out-of-town lawyers, David kept his word to Carole by preparing dinner. Their meal was subdued; David felt Carole trying to avoid expressing the tension she so clearly felt. By the time they went to bed, lawyers from Las Vegas and Los Angeles had turned down Hana’s case, citing her inability to fund her own defense. “With Michael Jackson,” one remarked, “it was only little boys. And no one good would have tried that case for nothing.”

Though silent, both Carole and David were unable to sleep. The next morning, gently kissing her, David slid out of bed. “I’m going for a walk,” he told her. She did not ask him where, or why.

His path took him through Fort Mason, to the end of a pier jutting into the bay. Until he reached it, he allowed his mind to wander from person to person—Carole, Harold, Hana, Munira, Saeb, Betsy Shapiro, Max Salinas, and even, to his surprise, his own father and mother. His questions were at once momentous and banal, the stuff of moral choice and a thousand dormitory bull sessions.

David did not doubt that the answers to these questions might define his future, and that of others. That he had to consider them at all filled him with misgivings and, at times, a deep resentment of Hana Arif—he had offered her a life with him, and instead she had returned to disrupt the life he had worked to build without her. The evidence against her, while fragmentary, was damning. Yet the David Wolfe who had loved her, against all reason, could not accept that she was capable of murder.

That she was capable of lying, and perhaps untroubled by it, he knew well. But he kept recalling what she had said to him two nights ago:
To stay
with Munira, I might murder Amos Ben-Aron. But I would never risk abandoning my daughter.
Though David had never been a parent, this had the resonance of truth.

I love my daughter,
Harold had told him,
more than life. Perhaps you cannot love her quite that much. But more, I hope, than this woman you’re hurting her for.

Sitting at the end of the pier, David pondered his choices.

A lawyer who insisted on Hana’s innocence would have few options. The nature of the evidence did not admit the possibility of mischance. Either Hana was an architect of terror or another architect had created a design that might condemn her to die in prison, from old age or lethal injection.

Were he a congressman but Hana dead, could he tell himself that he had acted rightly?

To hand this case to a capable lawyer would, perhaps, allow for peace of mind. Even setting aside the costs to David, the doubts he had expressed to Hana were compelling—there might well come a moment, fatal to her defense, where his emotions would distort his judgment. But Max Salinas was not the answer. And in the absence of a better alternative, David also knew his own strengths. He was a talented and creative trial lawyer, ready for this challenge, and he understood Sharpe and the system better than most. The fact that others would despise him would not in itself be a deterrent—were it not for Carole and his ambitions, he might well take the case.

So there it was—yet wasn’t. Because he had already paid too high a price for loving Hana Arif.

Did he still? Such a feeling was absurd—at most, surely, he loved his memories of a twenty-three-year-old woman he once had thought he understood. As for the woman in prison, thirteen years a wife and mother, he would believe in her at his peril.
So let me tell you who I’ve become,
Hana had implored him,
in the years since you believed I was worthy of becoming your wife. I’m a mother. A mother who loves Munira far too much to let Saeb raise her without me.

Restless, David plucked the cell phone from the pocket of his wind-breaker.

On its voice mail was a message from a former colleague living in Manhattan. His own practice was jammed with trials, his friend explained; his new marriage, he added dryly, was something he could not abandon for the pro bono defense of a Palestinian terrorist accused of murdering the prime minister of Israel.

David found himself gazing at the cell phone in his hand.
What kind of terrorist mastermind,
Hana had asked,
passes out her cell phone number?

Once again, his lawyer’s instincts quickened.
If there was a deliberate breach on the Israeli side,
he had told Betsy Shapiro,
then someone potentially within our reach holds the key to
what happened, and who was behind it.

Putting away the cell phone, David began his long walk home, trying to untangle principle from passion, wholly uncertain of what lay ahead.

“It would just be for the arraignment,” David said slowly. “Until I can find somebody who’s qualified to defend her.”

“You won’t.” Sitting in David’s living room, Carole spoke softly; what betrayed her was the look in her eyes, filling with hurt and disbelief. “Do you love me at all, David? Or my father?”

David’s mouth felt dry. “Of course. But if I do this, neither of you is going to die. If I don’t, Hana Arif may well. Maybe there’s no living with you if I take this case. But how do I live with myself if I don’t? This isn’t about who loves who the most.”

“Isn’t it? Then why defend her?”

“Because something’s just not right here, and she deserves a decent lawyer—”

“You and she were
lovers.
You can’t cloak this in being a lawyer—you’re my fiancé, we have a life together. Now all that feels like it was a script someone else had given you to read.” Carole stood, her voice choked with feeling. “I think you’re still in love with her, like in some Hitchcock film about obsession,
Fatal Attraction
in reverse. You’d throw away our life just to get her out of jail.”

“That’s not fair,” David interrupted in a low voice. “This isn’t you, Carole.”

She sat down, imploring now. “Then tell me, please, what about me isn’t enough for you? I feel like you’ve seen your long-lost love, and now you’re looking at what you’ve had to settle for—me.”

“I didn’t go looking for this.”

“No.
She
came looking for
you.
And Amos Ben-Aron.” Carole’s voice rose. “I’m afraid for you, too—that she’ll destroy you. You’ll be like the walking dead.”

Sitting beside her, he put his arms around her. “I still want our life . . .”

She pulled away. “Then it can’t include Hana Arif, or the life we’ll lead will be the one she’ll leave you with. No politics. No community to call your own. No sense of who you are, or what limits that imposes. David Wolfe, the wandering Jew.” Her voice filled with anguish. “Does what happened to my father mean nothing to you? Do you even have a conscience?”

David felt the pain cut through him. “I have a conscience. Like it or not, it’s telling me I’m not just some Jewish prototype to be plugged into a slot.”

“I have a conscience, too,” Carole shot back. “And the deepest part of it remembers seeing the best hope of Israel blown into a thousand bloody pieces. By this woman you’re defending.” Tears sprang to Carole’s eyes. “You can’t love me and do this for her. You can’t even love yourself.”

Abruptly, she turned away, face in her hands. David reached for her. “We’ve both said way too much, Carole. We need time to work this out.”

“There won’t be anything left to work on.” Carole turned to him, eyes still moist, voice drained of all emotion. “I love you, David, more than you can ever love
me
. I thought that I could live with that. But now I
know
way too much. Please, at least let me keep my dignity.”

Heartsick, David watched her leave, taking the life they had made with her.

In the white room, David sat across from Hana. It was strange—he felt as lost as she must. Softly, she said, “I thought I might never see you again.”

“So did I.”

Hana hesitated. “And your fiancée? How does
she
feel?”

“What makes you ask?”

“Two nights ago, when you gave all the reasons you could not help me, her name never passed your lips. Even then, I couldn’t help but notice the omission.”

David sat back. “Carole’s not germane to this discussion.”

Hana gave him a probing look. “I think perhaps she is. Do you love her?”

“Yes.” Despite his deep instinct of reserve, David felt the sudden need to talk. “She’s very smart and very warm. I trust her. Sometimes I think she cares more about what happens in my day than in hers.”

Stopping himself, David felt a fresh wave of remorse—he was still speaking in the present tense of someone he had lost, barely aware that he had lost her, unable to grasp how changed his life would be. Hana studied his face, as if seeing him anew. “And before Carole, you never wished to marry?”

“No. I kept wanting to feel more than I was able to.”

For a time, Hana was silent. In a tentative voice, she asked, “Did I do that to you? Did I truly hurt you that much?”

David felt a flash of anger—at her, and at himself. “Enough of this, Hana. I’m your lawyer now. You’ll have to be content with that.”

Hana looked away. When she looked back at him, her voice was clear. “I have asked too much of you, I realize now. I was scared, and had no one but you to trust.” She paused, then finished quietly: “Quit the case, David. They can appoint another lawyer.”

“Not another like me, I’m afraid—not without money. No one I tried wants this.”

Hana mustered a slight shrug. “All that the system requires is a lawyer good enough to lose without becoming an embarrassment. We learned that much at Harvard. And I heard you the other night, well enough. You don’t believe you can win.”

David looked into her eyes. “Did you do this, Hana?”

For a long moment, she gazed back at him in silence. “Part of me,” she said at last, “would like to tell you yes. Then, at least, you could just walk out of here, perhaps retrieve the life I sense you’re losing. But no, David, I did not conspire to assassinate Amos Ben-Aron.”

Once more, David reflected, he was in danger of losing himself with Hana Arif—this time, as her lawyer. He thought of Ben-Aron’s last seconds of life, and all that he was giving up to help the woman who might have killed him.

“Then let’s talk about the arraignment,” David said.

11     
T
o David, the morning of Hana’s arraignment felt jumbled and disorienting, a blur in which he struggled to suspend his disbelief.

He climbed the steps of the federal building through a gauntlet of minicams and reporters, keeping his eyes straight ahead, ignoring their shouted queries about why he had chosen to defend Hana Arif, the cacophony of angry demonstrators—more pro-Israeli than Palestinian—screened off by a wall of U.S. marshals. The only mercy was that Hana would not face them: the marshal’s office was bringing her up in an internal elevator from the garage, the end of a trip in which her truck was convoyed by motorcycles and police cars and media, helicopters overhead, an eerie echo of the motorcade for Amos Ben-Aron.

David entered the cavernous marble lobby. A relative oasis of civility, its access to the upper floors, the venue of the federal courts, was controlled by metal detectors and security guards. When David took his place at the end of a line of reporters shuffling through security, a woman from Channel 5 tried to question him; a U.S. marshal, recognizing David from his days as a federal prosecutor, whisked him through security and into an empty elevator. By the time he arrived on the nineteenth floor, David understood, more clearly than before, that he was no longer David Wolfe as he defined himself—he was the lawyer who, inexplicably, had chosen to defend a terrorist.

More reporters waited for him to exit the elevator. Had the choice been David’s, Saeb and Munira would have been with him; as David had argued to Saeb, this would remind those reading the paper or watching film clips that Hana had a husband and daughter. But Saeb had demanded that
David arrange their private entry through the garage, sparing Munira the attentions of “a pack of media jackals” ; wasn’t it enough, Saeb had inquired acidly, that David insisted that she watch her own mother being charged with murder?

And so, brushing off questions with a synthetic smile, David hurried down the tiled hallway, the reporters’ footsteps clattering behind him. He entered the airy but sterile courtroom of the judge who—assuming Hana was not deported—would either accept her plea of guilty or preside over a trial most jurists would gladly avoid.

The courtroom was full, lined with marshals along the walls and at the end of the aisle bisecting five rows of lacquered wooden benches. In the first row, Saeb and Munira sat between two more marshals. “Don’t make her cover,” David had implored. “I want Americans to look at her and imagine their own daughter.” To which Saeb had responded tersely, “She is
not
their daughter.” The girl David saw now wore a loose-fitting black dress that concealed all but her hands and head, covered in a black scarf. But no dress could conceal the girl’s desire to disappear; no head scarf could obscure her fear.