The Sacrificial Circumcision of the Bronx (8 page)

“Are you sure you’re not Casey?” asked the middle-aged woman with short auburn hair.

“No, I’m pretty sure I’m Uli … though I might be Paul.”

“You didn’t see my son? We were together and—”

“I didn’t see anything other than that damn net down there. It blocked my escape.”

“No one can make it all the way down that pipe,” some long beard called out. “People were drowning.”

“How do you know?”

“Know what?”

“That you can’t make it out?”

“Some guy told me.”

“Who?”

“The black dude we elected leader. He was the one who set up the netting to try to rescue anyone who was flowing through.”

“Where is he?” Uli asked, glancing around.

“Who?”

“The leader!” Uli snapped.

“Oh, he vanished into the Mkultra years ago,” the bearded man replied, and then as if to emulate the leader, he too wandered off.

13

T
he large chamber looked to Uli like some kind of vast primordial internment center. He remembered the roundups and deportations in 1920, including all the suspected anarchists that Attorney General Palmer and his boy, J. Edgar Hoover, had tracked down. A ship full of suspects had pulled away from Manhattan, deporting all the Red troublemakers back to Russia.

Just thinking of Hoover’s lumpy old face, Uli felt a mix of loyalty, friendship, and despair—he wasn’t sure if this was coming from himself or Paul. Uli vividly remembered him at the height of his power in the 1960s: Hoover, the stodgy authoritarian, shouting commandments down from high. He didn’t know why, but he could also envision the short pudgy man wearing a woman’s corset and garter belt, sitting on the edge of a bed. In another moment, as Paul’s memories came back into focus, he saw a different Hoover, slim and dapper, an ambitious young man who had secured his post in the Attorney General’s Office through his mother’s cousin. He could just as easily have served in the Department of Interior, like his father had, or worked in any other sector of government bureaucracy, like many of his other Washington relatives.

That year, Bella invited all three kids home for Rosh Hashanah. As soon as Paul showed up, she told him how Robert had recently traveled all the way to Cleveland for a minor bureaucratic interview, only to get rejected again.

When Robert and Mary arrived with their two baby girls, his sister and parents greeted them at the door. Emanuel shook hands with his youngest son and tried to utter some encouraging words, while Mary complained to Bella and Edna about how their apartment on the Upper West Side was getting too tight with the birth of their youngest daughter.

“Well, you’ve just got to find a bigger place,” Bella said with a big smile.

“Robert!” Paul called out, coming down the stairs. “It’s impossible to get ahold of you, brother.”

As Paul approached his sibling, Robert replied, “You dumb son of a bitch, you’ve ruined my life!”

“Robert!” their father snapped.

“You can’t talk to Paul that way!” Edna added.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Paul asked.

“When Mayor Hylan took office, some little creep approached me and said that if I ever poked my big kike nose in City Hall again, he’d make sure the papers got wind of my Bolshevik brother.”

“What?” Edna cried out. “Who said such a thing?”

“Evans, a Tammany Hall boy who they hired to get rid of me because of my reforms. He got the information from some muckety muck in Washington. Why don’t you tell them yourself, Paul: What was the real reason you quit your big Washington job?”

“What are you saying?” Bella asked.

“I’m saying that your eldest son became best friends with every bomb-throwing Commie in North America.”

“They weren’t my friends. I told the government everything I knew about them.”

“It was that damn Mexican girl.”

“Watch it!” Paul warned.

“If you want to rub Mom’s face in crap all her life, that’s your prerogative—”

“Robert, that’s an awful thing to say!” Bella interrupted.

“—but I’m not as forgiving as she is!”

“My relationship with Mom is none of your business,” Paul fired back.

“You gave your boy an Ivy League education and in return he’s become an enemy of this country.”

“Just stop it!” his mother gasped.

“When are you going to get it?” Robert asked. “He hates us!”

“Shut up, Robert, I’m not saying it again!”

“She and Dad worked so hard to get you that interview at Kuhn & Loeb. Everyone knew about it.”

“That’s enough, Robert,” Emanuel said.

“You thoroughly embarrassed her,” Robert jabbed.

“I appreciated what you did,” Paul said, turning to Bella.

“I just didn’t want to be a banker, Mom!”

“Instead, you became a goddamn lobbyist for an arms manufacturer,” Robert said.

“Byrd & Hale owns a number of companies, one of which is munitions. They promised that if I did lobbying work, they’d reward me with an electrical engineering job,” Paul explained to Bella.

“And you couldn’t even do that, could you? Your past caught up with you and you had to quit,” Robert continued. “Well, you ruined your career and now you’ve hurt mine too!”

“Look, Robert, I’m truly sorry,” Paul said. “Yes, I knew some unsavory types down in Mexico, but I had no involvement with any of this stuff.”

“I don’t reward people for screwing up my life. I punish them!”

“I never meant to embarrass you.”

“I think you should apologize to Paul,” Bella said.

“I’ve spent my life carefully avoiding situations like this,” Robert added, “and when I find out that my family has to pay the price because my brother wants to get in the sack with some hot little tamale—”

Paul slapped Robert, who nearly fell to the ground, remaining bent to one side for several seconds.

“Oh God!” Mary screamed. Her little girls shrieked. Even Edna covered her mouth.

“That’s enough!” Emanuel shouted, stepping forward between his two taller, broader sons. But he didn’t need to, neither brother was going any further. Uli knew that something irrevocable had just occurred between them.

When Paul grabbed his coat, only Maria, standing in the foyer, tried to stop him. He hurried out of the old brownstone, slamming the door behind him.

On his way home, Paul angrily assessed the full magnitude of his fight with Robert. For the first time, Paul had actually seemed to be in a superior position, and his brother must have decided that this calculated act would turn their mother’s opinion around. Robert wasn’t a failure, just a victim of his brother’s cavalier behavior. And Paul—who was finally doing well—was the clear cause of Robert’s recent bad luck.

Further proof that this was a premeditated act, Paul noted, was the fact that he had repeatedly tried to meet with Robert in recent weeks to offer his support. Now it was clear that Robert had just been biding his time—all for this ambush. Some peon had probably revealed his meeting with that snot-nosed Hoover kid in Washington. Instead of approaching Paul and conveying his anger and frustration, Robert was using it as capital, exploiting this embarrassing development for all to see.

By the next morning, though, Paul decided he was being unfair, even paranoid. There’s no way his younger brother could be this strategic or diabolical. He simply lacked the guile. Paul began to feel guilty for even thinking such a thing.

Over the ensuing days, the more he thought about it, the worse he felt about what had happened with Robert. His brother was a young father of two, and just when he thought he had reached some station of security—a plum assignment from Mayor Mitchel—it was pulled away in the most humiliating fashion. All the rage and frustration of being dismissed by the boy mayor and then being snubbed by Hylan and Tammany Hall and so many others—Paul could hardly blame Robert for losing his temper.

About a month later, Paul received a call from Bella with exciting news. Due to the blessed intervention of some politico’s wife, Robert had just had an encouraging meeting with the newly elected governor, Al Smith. Great things were on the horizon. A week later, she called Paul again to announce that Robert had been appointed Smith’s chief of staff. He was placed on a commission addressing the reorganization of the state government, something very much akin to what he had been feverishly trying to do for the City of New York.

Paul decided to call Robert at home, hoping to congratulate him on the news. Mary picked up to say that Robert was still at the office. Paul told her that he was truly sorry for their spat, and that he wanted to apologize for his behavior.

That weekend, when Robert still hadn’t called, Paul tried again. This time, Mary said that Robert had gotten his message but was too busy to call back. “He told me to say thanks. When things calm down, he’ll call you.”

Paul asked for his brother’s work number, but Mary just giggled nervously and said that even she didn’t know it yet. It was clear that despite Robert’s reversal of fortune, he was not yet ready to forgive Paul.

In mid-September, just as Paul was getting up the nerve to pay another unannounced visit to Robert at his New York City office, the unthinkable occurred: A horse-drawn wagon approached a lunchtime crowd at 23 Wall Street and detonated a hundred pounds of explosives along with five hundred pounds of cast-iron slugs, leaving scores maimed and dying. Thirty-eight people were killed and over four hundred were wounded. A note found nearby said,
Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you!

Once again, a pair of officers from the Department of Justice paid Paul a visit, this time at his Con Ed office on 14th Street. They deliberately embarrassed him by pulling him out of an important committee meeting.

“We find it mighty strange that Hoover tossed you out of Washington and the bombings stop there,” said one of the investigators. “Then you come down here and they follow you.”

“I swear, I don’t know a thing about it,” Paul replied nervously. Things were going well at Con Ed and he feared that they were now going to ask him to leave New York.

“You don’t remember anything else from Mexico, do you?”

“Absolutely not. I told Hoover everything,” he assured them.

Paul did not lose his job, and after six months at Con Ed, he became a chief consultant and had earned enough respect to finally be put in charge of his pet project, a large feasibility study on the energy generated by a dam on the St. Lawrence River.

No electricity down here,
Uli thought as he roamed naked along the wide floor. Small votive candles lined rows of crooked walkways. Most people sat or laid upon clumps of papers. Office items appeared to have been modified into primitive tools: staplers were hammers; trash cans served as toilets; an old Underwood typewriter, caked with what appeared to be blood, may have been used as a weapon.

Uli heard occasional groans set against a constant chorus of weeping, and as he walked onward, they morphed into a kind of forceful chant. Uli spotted a group of the worshippers kneeling in lines, all facing the rear wall where the sluice gates were. One man stood in front, leading the group like a minister. The guy was holding what appeared to be homemade rosaries.

“How many people are there down here?” Uli asked the lost mother, who was moving along with him.

“I don’t know. A bunch went into there.” She pointed to a hole in the wall.

“What is this place?”

“They call it Streptococci River cause it’s supposedly infectious, but everyone drinks the refiltered water.”

“What are they doing here?”

“Whenever people wander into the Mkultra they vanish, so the leader told us to wait until he finds a way out.”

“Who is the leader?”

“A great memory man,” some old beard passing nearby piped up.

“This is my boy Casey.”

“I’m afraid not,” Uli reminded her.

She suddenly turned angry. “What the hell did you do with my boy?”

“He escaped,” Uli lied. “He made it all the way through the pipe.”

“Thank God!” She put her hand over her heart.

Uli sat down. It was getting harder for him to focus. Paul Moses’s life was pushing back through.

14

P
aul moved quickly up the Con Ed executive training program, but he worked almost constantly. His mother invited him to various society functions, hoping he would meet a future wife. It was at one of these parties that he was introduced to a sexy divorcée named Teresa. She’d had two kids with her husband before leaving him for chasing every skirt that crossed his path. After five dry martinis, Paul confessed that while he had been with a number of women, few seemed to truly enjoy sex.

“Then I guess I’d be your first,” she boldly said, downing her drink.

Uli found himself thirsting for water, so he took a sip from a rusty old water pump, but spat it right back out. The dark liquid tasted like shit.

“You better learn to like it if you have any hope of surviving down here,” said the lost mother.

He found an empty cardboard mat and lay down.

Paul was surprised that his brother was actually learning to play the game of politics and had succeeded in pushing through his massive overhaul of the state government. This involved an extensive consolidation of ragtag agencies and slapdash departments into a handful of more efficient ones. The money saved in eliminating redundancy alone was considerable. The restructuring earned Governor Smith such good press that editorials began suggesting he’d make a good president. He rewarded Robert by elevating him to New York’s secretary of state.

“This puts my
bubala
in line to run for governor himself,” Bella speculated, adding that this was exactly what Robert had been hoping for.

Through the aggressive campaigning of both parents at dinner one evening, Mr. Robert finally forgave Paul with a firm handshake. Relations, though never warm, became cordial. Neither brought up the anarchist charge nor the slap ever again.

For his part, Paul began overseeing other feasibility studies for Con Ed throughout the northeast. One day, a dear friend from his time in the army, Colonel Stuart Greene, who was now head of the Department of Public Works in Al Smith’s administration, called to say that Paul would be perfect for a top engineering post in his department.