Salvation Boulevard (13 page)

Two new windows near the front, predominantly in blues and grays, were memorials to the Holocaust.

“The sun is shining outside,” said the rabbi. “We live in the land of milk and honey. Not
Eretz Yisrael,
but a land of milk and honey that is rich beyond all of history's imagination.

“Yet, there is violence. One man picks up a gun and ends another man's life, leaving a widow, leaving family, leaving friends, creating grief, creating pain.

“Stranger still, the man with the gun believed he was doing right. Emmanuel Goldfarb, at the same time, believed that the things that he was doing, which provoked such rage, were the right things to do. Out of all this righteousness, came great wrong.

“These are questions we have had to ask through all our history. We began to think, naïvely, that they would begin to fade away. That differences of belief would be settled through reasoned discourse, and when they could not be, they could cohabit in a land of milk and honey and tolerance.

“We were wrong. These are questions that have become more urgent.”

“I watch television,” the rabbi said. “And I check out the competition.”

That got a laugh.

“A lot of these other religions, they have answers. Here, I'm afraid, you just get questions. What can I tell you, we're Jews.”

Another laugh.

“There are mysteries. I believe. I believe there is God above, somewhere, who made us and watches over us and is telling us what is right and wrong. Yet, I also believe that when people believe in dogma, it leads to violence and death, like the tragedy before us, here, today.”

So, too, did I believe that I was doing the right thing, protecting my family and punishing the wicked, when I kicked the shit out of Tod Timley. But I had, without intent, without thinking of it, sent his fear and anger in a new direction. Yes, I had probably increased it too, driven him from threat into action.

I didn't need a rabbi to make me realize that. As Tod Timley stepped out of the crowd, in his cheap blue windbreaker, before he raised the gun, I knew and said to myself, my God, what have I done?

The rabbi listed Manny's achievements, his associations, his contributions, how he did pro bono work, how he raised money for the UJA, Planned Parenthood, and the ACLU. The last two would have gotten him hung at Cathedral of the Third Millennium.

“One day,” the rabbi said, “when Manny was telling me lawyer jokes—they were his favorite—I asked him about the law and about his profession and how he, himself, felt about it. He admitted that the law, like most things in the world today, ends up serving the rich and the powerful. It protects them; it plays tricks for them. Sometimes it does wrong; sometimes it does right.

“But then he said this, and I say, let this be his epitaph. ‘As a Jew, we must hold the law sacred, not merely in the old way, because we claim to be the people of the law, but because we understand that it is the law, and only the law, that stands between us and destruction.'”

There was nothing so formal as a receiving line. But the widow stood in the lobby while they loaded the casket into the hearse and organized the cars, and a thicket of black suits surrounded her, saying their condolences. There were red ties and blue and gold. There were shiny leather shoes and the bald spots of serious men, and on their way to the widow, a word or two about an opportunity, a connection, and after they left her, another about a deal, a contribution, support, quid pro quo. There were women with handbags and handkerchiefs, and a lot of dabbing at eyes.

I suddenly found myself next to Jorge Guzman.

He held out his hand and asked, “How are you, Carl?” in a calm, conversational tone. He wore a sober suit. He could have been a cousin in the investment-counseling business. “I'll miss him.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said.

“I mean personally. Manny was
muy hombre,
or like his people say, a
mensch.
The legal thing too, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“He was good,” Jorge said, shaking his head ruefully.

“He was my friend,” I said.

“You have no idea how rare that is,” he said. “Not you having friends—I'm sure you have many.” There was always a certain care in
the way Jorge spoke, as if he was controlling his accent or making sure he didn't say anything he wouldn't want to have played on tape in open court. “I meant good lawyers. Most people don't know because they only have a lawyer a couple of times in their lives, usually when they close on their house, or maybe when one of their kids gets into a little bit of trouble, so they don't know how it's supposed to go. But let me tell you, you do a lot of business with lawyers and you find out how bad most of them are. They file papers late, they don't read the depositions, they don't listen, and they don't know the law. It's not like on TV, my friend. You know anybody as good as Manny?”

“Not offhand,” I said.

Hobson was staring at us.

“I have got to find somebody. You think of someone really, really good, like him, you let me know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“How about you? Manny was an important client to you. Are you going to be able to make that up?”

“I'll have to go out and hustle,” I said.

“You ever do business investigations?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Usually I work through lawyers, but sure.”

“Why don't you give me a call,” he said. He took a card out of his pocket and tucked it into the outside breast pocket of my jacket.

I suddenly got annoyed. Maybe by the intimacy of the gesture, or maybe because I was going to need some new clients and was afraid of what I might slide into working for the front man of the Gulf Cartel. “Look, Jorge, I always need work. But—look, I don't want to offend anyone—but I remember witnesses disappearing, and juries acting very strange. I'm not a cop anymore, so it's not my business to do anything about it, but I would have a problem being part of certain things, like if I told you a guy was stealing from one of your companies and then found out something happened to him.”

“I appreciate so much frankness.”

“Oh, you do?”

“Truth is of great value. It's very efficient. Untruths, even polite untruths, waste a lot of time and energy. If I call you, it won't be about something that will distress you.” He paused. “I promise,” he said with a smile. “In the meantime, I like to think that a friend of my friend,” referring to Manny with a tone of respect, “is my friend. If there is ever anything I can do for you, call me.”

 

“What were you talking to that prick about,” Jeremiah asked, intercepting me on the way to the widow.

“He's looking for a good lawyer,” I said.

Jerry is tall and bland, with the face of a manager, a great test taker and the mind of a Sicilian claims adjuster. He kisses up and kicks down. “Be careful with him,” he said, like he thought he was still sitting above me.

“What are you doing here? I wouldn't have thought that . . . ”

“That I was friends with your ACLU buddy?”

“Yeah.”

“There's an old story or joke about some movie star . . . ”

“You're not usually a guy who tells jokes. How come everyone wants to tell jokes at this funeral?”

“Yeah, well, the punch line, or whatever you call it, was that they went to the funeral to make sure he was dead.”

“Go fuck yourself, Hobson,” I said.

“And while we're on the subject,” he said, as if I hadn't said a thing, “let's make sure the Nazami thing is dead too. Let it go, Carl. Give it a decent burial, and let it go quietly.”

Paul Plowright asked me to come see him.

 

The city is down on the flatlands by the river. To the north, there's a series of ridges, each higher than the other, until you hit the mountains.

Cathedral of the Third Millennium sits on the first of those heights.

The church itself is a rising wave, optimistic and open. It is anchored to a round office tower to your left as you enter. Like the church, it's mostly glass, but it has wide stripes of white stone facings that suggest columns.

It's always lit. You can see it for miles. The beacon in the desert. The shining city on the hill.

The church has a membership of thirty-eight thousand. It employs about twelve hundred. It takes in over $110 million a year. It produces and distributes radio and television programs; it publishes books, pamphlets, and bibles; it has outreach and missionary programs. It has a prison ministry that is now profitable thanks to federal funding for faith-based initiatives. It develops Christian communities that include schools, which it runs. It has a college.

It has its own exit off the interstate, Exit 31, Salvation Boulevard.
The average church in America has about two hundred members.

That prompts the question, how did Paul Plowright do it? His answer is that God led him to it. He marks out the story of his younger years as Five Revelations. Though he did not recognize them for what they were as they were happening, until the last of them.

 

The First Revelation:

His father had an insight of his own. He served in the infantry during World War II and came to believe the most important thing in life was a pair of boots that wouldn't raise blisters.

Demobilized, he used his back pay and a bank loan to open Plowright's Better Shoes and Western Boots, with the slogan “We guarantee the fit!” It was downtown, three blocks from the courthouse, until about ten years ago, when real estate skyrocketed and Paul's brother was able to retire by leasing the space to The Gap.

All the kids went to work in the store starting when they were ten years old. Paul, born in 1948, was the oldest of the four. From the first, he was good with customers and was out front while the other kids were stocking shelves and sweeping up.

When he was twelve, his mother took him to Raab's Department Store, down the block, to get his first good suit. Chatting with the salesman, he found out that the man got commissions.

Paul told his father he wanted commissions too!

His father said no. They were a family. All for one and one for all.

Paul had never gone up against his parents. This time he did. Something inside him knew that individuals should reap the rewards, and also pay the consequences, of their individual actions. It would make him work harder—he just knew it would. Not only that, if he sold more shoes, the store would do better, and if the store did better, the whole family profited.

It was a twelve-year-old's intuitive, individual understanding of the difference between free capitalism and collectivism.

There had to be
consequences.

The Second Revelation:

His father agreed to give it a try. Paul quickly figured out that it was not enough to just work harder. He couldn't force customers to buy. He had to work smarter. He had to watch for those moments when they decided to make a purchase, or decided not to.

His father, who had marched across North Africa and Sicily and up the spine of Italy, was obsessed with practicality. Paul saw that selling was about something else. Customers wanted to
feel
that the shoes made them attractive or special, that they were being ‘taken care of,' that the salesman was a friend they could trust, that they were getting ‘value for their money' or a ‘special bargain.' Whatever that extra thing was, if they weren't sure they were getting it, they hung back, but the minute they were
certain
they were getting it, they bought the shoes.

People craved
certainty.

 

The Third Revelation:

Down here, the sixties were still the fifties. The boys had crew cuts and said sir and ma'am. Girls kept their knees together and held out for marriage. When Paul put his hard-earned money into the big adventure of going to an out-of-town college, he was expecting the sort of place where Ronald Reagan was on the football team, wearing a leather helmet and eager to go out and ‘win one for the Gipper.'

The University of Wisconsin in Madison did not turn out to be that way.

“I remember this particularly from my second semester,” he's said in numerous sermons. “I'd taken Psych 101, and now I was taking a course called ‘Deviant Psychology.'

“Everything that the ‘science of the mind' had defined as deviant—drug abuse, promiscuity, nymphomania, homosexuality, threesomes, foursomes, and free-sex communes, abortion, women having children out of wedlock and proud of it, defiance of authority, hatred of parents, the public use of foul language, shoplifting, stealing, drug dealing, political unrest, political violence, burning buildings, race
mixing, deviant subcultures—was happening right outside the classroom window. Sometimes in the classroom! And it wasn't being condemned; it was being encouraged, cheered on, celebrated!

“They put up posters of Mao Tse Tung, a Communist, atheist, mass murderer, of Che Guevera, who'd helped enslave the people of Cuba. They made a hero out of Eldridge Cleaver, a rapist, who boasted of practicing on black women before he started attacking white women. His partner, Huey Newton, a convicted killer. Their idols were Jimmy Hendrix and Jim Morrison, self-destructive drug abusers. Like little Jane Fondas, they cheered the Viet Cong for killing Americans in the jungle.

“It was worse than wrong. It was tragic. It was a betrayal.”

He'd always known that America had enemies. His father had gone off to fight the Nazis. We were locked in a death struggle with the Soviet empire. He was certain of the valor of the American fighting man. He knew we could never be defeated on the battlefield.