The Bomb Maker's Son (2 page)

“Nonsense,” my mother says. “You were born to perform. If not on stage, then in a courtroom. You’re going to take Ian’s case.”

“I don’t think so, Harriet,” I say.

She stands up, walks over to Holzner, and loops her arm in his. She’s beaming like a grimy street lamp in a littered alley. “Parker Stern, I’d like to introduce you to your father, Ian Holzner. Ian, this is our son, Parky.”

I’d think this was one of my mother’s cruel, manipulative games, that Ian Holzner couldn’t possibly be my father, except for one thing. When I look at him, really look, I realize that I resemble him as only a son can resemble a father.

CHAPTER TWO

As a kid, I often asked my mother to tell me about my father. Among her stories, she told me that he was a fallen war hero, a spy, a musician, an anti–Vietnam War radical, and a famous actor. As a four-year-old, I once, between takes on a sound stage, asked the actor I was working with whether he was my father. After he said “no,” I went on to pose the same question to every male member of the crew. When my mother realized what I was doing, she dragged me away by the arm and slapped me. By the time I reached eight, I’d figured out that everything she’d told me about my father was a lie. After that, when I asked about my father, she’d tell me that his identity was none of my concern. Later, when I understood what
sleeping around
meant, I concluded that she probably didn’t know herself who my father was. It turns out that he really
was
an antiwar radical. What better way to conceal the truth than to slip it among a bunch of lies?

But now I know why she lied, because how could she tell me the truth? In the space of five seconds, her revelation has rewritten my past the way a well-placed footnote can change the meaning of an entire book. I’ve always believed that if I met my father, I’d feel rage or confusion or joy or resentment. This awkward reunion has left me numb. I thought I’d have a million questions. I can’t think of one.

Holzner deftly disengages his arm from my mother and looks down at the floor as if embarrassed. At least he’s exhibiting the right emotion.

“Don’t worry, I’m not here to play daddy,” he says.

I don’t know whether I’m relieved or disappointed.

“I’m here because I need a lawyer. You’ve gone against powerful adversaries, and nothing is more powerful than the United States government. You’ve taken on tough cases, and my case couldn’t be tougher. That’s why I want to hire you.” He speaks in the cadence of an evangelist. I know where I got my acting and lawyering chops.

“Can you pay my legal fees?” I ask. I don’t really care about the finances, but talking money is the best way to stay detached.

“I told you that I’d make sure you got paid,” Harriet says.

My eyes stay on Holzner.

“I can’t afford to pay you anything,” he says. “I’ve been an auto mechanic for the past twenty-seven years. If you won’t take your mother’s money, then I’m afraid you’ll have to take the case pro bono.”

My mother was always attracted to dissemblers, the worst being an evil hack actor named Bradley Kelly, the founder of the Sanctified Assembly. She trained me to be an actor, thrust a toddler into a bogus world. People think the legal profession is built on lies, but the fact is that a lawyer has a state-sanctioned obligation to search for the truth. That’s one reason I became an attorney. At least this Holzner fellow is forthright, or so it seems.

“What are you accused of,” I ask.

He walks over to me slowly, in a relaxed stride that seems calculated to appear unthreatening. “On Tuesday, December seventeenth, nineteen seventy-five, at around three thirty in the afternoon, a bomb exploded at the Veterans Administration in Playa Delta, California. Four people died and nineteen were injured. I had a history of blowing things up in the name of revolution. The Playa Delta bomb bore my signature. I didn’t do it.”

“Who did?”

“That’s the problem with being innocent,” he says. “You don’t know what really happened.”

I look at my mother. “Is that who you were, back then, too? A kid playing guerilla soldier?”

As always when I ask about her past, she glares at me but doesn’t respond.

“Your mother was never political,” Holzner says.

Harriet turns her back on us and goes to the window overlooking the ocean.

“Tell me more,” I say.

“I was a radical guerrilla soldier committed to ending the Vietnam War. We did that. After the war ended, it was our goal to foment a violent revolution that would bring down the racist, imperialistic American capitalist system.” He smiles sardonically. “Grandiose, wasn’t it? The other principal leader of our collective, Rachel O’Brien, was tried and convicted for conspiracy. At her trial, she blamed me for the bombing. She lied.”

“Can you prove that she lied?”

“No.”

“Then how do you propose I defend you?”

“Do you know what the FBI’s COINTELPRO was?”

“Why don’t you tell me about it.”

“Short for
Counter Intelligence Program
. J. Edgar Hoover’s attempt at destroying revolutionary organizations like the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and my group. A covert operation, and completely illegal.”

Harriet walks back over to us. “The government still uses illegal tactics to spy on law-abiding citizens, to trample on constitutional rights.”

“So say the Sanctified Assembly propagandists,” I reply.

Ordinarily, she’d snap back, but now she crosses her arms and looks to Holzner almost deferentially.

“COINTELPRO’s investigation of the Weather Underground was so dirty that no one went to jail,” Holzner says. “You could use the same defense.”

“There’s a difference,” I say. “If I’m not mistaken, their bombs never killed or injured anyone. You’re charged with multiple murders, and we live in a post-9/11 world.”

“I didn’t harm anyone, either. The cops set me up, illegally seized evidence. Fabricated it.”

“I need specifics.”

“Three COINTELPRO agents picked up my brother, Jerry, by the ankles, dangled him off a third-floor landing, and threatened to drop him headfirst if he didn’t tell them my whereabouts. They repeatedly broke into my parents’ home and conducted illegal searches, trying to make it look like burglary. I believe they illegally taped conversations of people I knew.”

There’s a sharp rapping from the faux-brass door knocker, followed immediately by four knocks with pounding fists. Another breach of building security. Holzner and my mother glance at each other, two people who share a secret and a plan. More pounding, so hard that I fear the wood will splinter. Holzner dashes toward the glass door that leads to my balcony, slides it open, and, like some 1960s-movie cat burglar, vaults over the concrete wall—a remarkable feat for anyone, and especially a man his age. I hurry after him and look down, expecting to see him lying injured after a drop from the second floor. He’s gone.

Before I can stop her, my mother goes over and opens the door to two men dressed in black suits and red ties, the uniform worn by enforcers for the Church of the Sanctified Assembly. With them is a tall, angular woman with Eurasian features. She’s dressed in a black pantsuit and red business blouse. She wears no makeup, and yet her round face, wide eyes, and tapered nose make her beautiful, if any human who shows no emotion can truly be beautiful.

Maybe it’s my mother’s straighter posture or her harsh gaze, but she’s Quiana again, and only now do I truly notice that she hasn’t been Quiana since she showed up at my condo.

“What are you doing here, Heim?” my mother says in a condescending tone.

“We were concerned about you, ma’am,” the woman says unctuously. “And we obviously had reason to be.” She deigns to let her icy brown eyes drift over to me. “We didn’t expect to find you in the presence of this apostate.” Her tone has changed to mildly disdainful, unheard of for an Assembly functionary. Harriet starts to speak but doesn’t say a word. This Heim is either risking harsh punishment or isn’t the low-level functionary I took her to be.

“And I didn’t expect the Sanctified Assembly gestapo to trespass on my property,” I say. “Get out.” I walk over and interpose myself between the trio and my mother. The two thugs close ranks and come forward.

“You’re impertinent,” my mother says to me. “Just remember what I’ve told you and heed my words. You’re to back off, Parker.” She turns to the Assembly devotees. “I have no obligation to explain myself to you, Mariko. But if you had a brain in your head, you’d realize that this person was
once
related to me and that he spends his life blaspheming. I can get him to stop.” She motions with her fingers and walks out the door. The two men follow immediately, but the woman lingers, regarding me with scorn, until she, too, walks out the door.

Only then do I consciously understand what just happened. I tried to protect my mother. I haven’t done that since I was eleven years old. These people are supposed to obey her every command. What is it about Ian Holzner that would make Harriet risk her exalted position? It can’t just be that forty years ago, he saddled her with me.

CHAPTER THREE

One of the selling points of my condo unit is the ability to stand outside on the balcony and watch the sailboats, tour crafts, and speedboats maneuver through the Marina Del Rey jetty and out into the Pacific’s vastness. The sun-dappled surface, the sharp horizon, the wispy cirrus clouds leave the false impression that the sea has discernible boundaries. Only at night, facing the dense black, can one conjure the true ocean and begin to understand that its apparent contours, like the apparent contours of life, are products of deficient imagination.

I look out into the void and try to process what just happened. My mother is apparently jeopardizing her position in the Assembly to help a man who’s an alleged murderer. For all I know, Ian Holzner is some Sanctified Assembly elder involved in a byzantine scheme that only he and Harriet understand. Harriet claims he isn’t. But she’s lied to manipulate others for at least as long as I’ve had memory.

Still, I’m curious, both as a lawyer presented with a singular case and as a son who’s discovered his long-lost father. I power up my computer and search the name
Ian Holzner
. The
Wikipedia
article shows a black-and-white news photograph of him taken during a protest over the 1970 National Guard killing of four students at Kent State University. Despite his Fu Manchu moustache and shoulder-length dark hair, he bears a striking resemblance to how I looked when I was that age. I find myself irrationally staring at the photo to confirm that that young man is
not
me, mystically transported back in time. He’s wearing a military camouflage jacket and work shirt, like you see in movies and TV shows about that era. A cliché. He’s holding a megaphone, his lips parted midspeech. His right arm is raised in the air, fist clenched. Another cliché. But clichés begin as powerful symbols, and these particular symbols started with guys like Holzner.

I scroll down to the “Early Life” section. He was born on January 22, 1949, in Playa Delta, California, the adopted son of former vaudevillians. His father, a tightrope walker and juggler, was of Irish descent. His mother, who was Jewish, was one of the record-breaking acrobats depicted in a famous picture on the top of San Francisco’s Coit Tower in 1946.

The article contains a link to a YouTube video of the stunt. The men are shirtless, and the woman is dressed in a gymnast’s leotard and a tutu. One of the men is stretched out in a backbend on the building’s ledge. A second man is doing a handstand on the prone man’s chest. Holzner’s mother is doing a handstand by holding onto the second man’s feet. Only the acrobats’ collective ability to maintain their balance keeps her from tumbling off the building to certain death. My insides flutter and dip not only because I don’t like heights but also because I realize the woman in this video is my grandmother.

I return to the
Wikipedia
entry. Holzner’s parents encouraged him to take up gymnastics. In 1967, UC Berkeley awarded him a full athletic scholarship. Upon enrolling, he majored in engineering but later switched to philosophy. As a freshman member of the gymnastics team, he was named an All American for the floor exercise. He narrowly missed qualifying for the 1968 US Olympic team. So that’s how a sixty-five-year-old man was able to vault over my second-story balcony and disappear into the night. The man is a stranger, and yet I feel irrational pride in his early accomplishments.

The article goes on to describe how Holzner, deeply affected by the police beatings of protestors at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, gave up gymnastics for anti–Vietnam War, and later, antigovernment, politics. He dropped out of college midway through his sophomore year. Over time, he became involved in increasingly violent confrontations with the police. He was arrested and jailed for disturbing the peace, trespassing, destruction of property, and criminal conspiracy.

The end of the Vietnam War in 1973 didn’t diminish his radicalism. That same year, he and a woman named Rachel O’Brien formed a collective that law enforcement dubbed the Holzner-O’Brien Gang, which claimed responsibility for bombing several federal facilities and businesses throughout the western United States, causing only property damage but no bodily injury. The reasons for the continued violence were unfocused: a corporation’s support of South African apartheid; another’s support of a coup in Chile; the Oregon Health Department’s alleged sterilization of poor women; the Los Angeles Police Department’s involvement in the deaths of six members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. It seems that, once the Vietnam War was over, Holzner and his ilk were aspiring revolutionaries in search of a cause. Or maybe he just enjoyed making bombs and setting them off.

As Holzner told me, the 1975 bombing of the Playa Delta Veterans Administration killed four and injured nineteen. Although no one took credit for the act of terror, forensic analysis identified Holzner as the bomb maker. After a manhunt that lasted days, and in which he was supposedly holed up in a house in the South Central ghetto, he somehow evaded capture, spending years on the FBI’s most-wanted list until more contemporary criminals and terrorists supplanted him. His partner, Rachel O’Brien, was arrested in 1976 during a raid on an Oregon commune. She was tried for murder but avoided the rap by implicating Holzner in the bombing. The jury did convict her on the lesser charge of conspiracy. She served seven years in prison before winning parole in 1983.