The Sunset Gang (12 page)

He would never understand how the idea had popped into his
head, only that suddenly it was there, along with the knife that flashed in his
hands and he was smiling, enjoying the anguish in the young man's face. He bent
down on one knee and tugged at the man's belt, ripping the zipper as he opened
the fly, then rolling the man's pants to his knees, looking downward in the
faint light at the man's exposed genitals, retracted in fear. The young man
whimpered as Bernie waved the knife in front of him, embellishing his own sense
of cruelty, watching the tears fill the young man's eyes and hearing the
whimpers in his chest.

"I'm gonna make you a Jew, you dirty miserable mick
bastard," Bernie hissed, feeling the hurt of his whole life assail him
with the force of a single blow, feeling the hatred surge in his body as he
gripped the handle of the knife and held it in front of the young man's face.
The blue eyes blinked and the tears of terror flowed over the lids as the eyes
closed tightly and the head rolled in anguish. He reached downward for the
retracted penis, the foreskin drawn over the tip, the flesh felt cold as ice.
The hand that held the knife shook as he tried to brace his own body to keep
his hand steady. The point of the knife moved downward and the young, man's
body began to shiver uncontrollably so that with his shaking hand and the
shivering body, he knew it would be impossible to do the operation. Perhaps it
was the transmission to himself of the young man's fear, which he felt now, but
he was suddenly disgusted with himself for having entertained the idea. He
stood up, the rage gone, breathing deeply, hearing the knife clatter to the
ground as he backed out of the urine-smelling stair well into the street, where
he tried to relieve his anguish and the horror of his own aborted act with
great gulps of the night air.

Later he threw the outfit and the beard down the
incinerator of his apartment building.

In recalling that incident, he could illustrate to himself
how it was possible for a put-upon people like the Jews to erupt in violence.

"Don't push us too hard," he told his fellow cops
after this incident, feeling for the moment more mature and tolerant.

When Hitler rose to power in Germany and began publicly
persecuting Jews and sending them to concentration camps, Bernie Bromberg once
again received absolute confirmation of his philosophy that "all goyim
hate Jews." The evidence was convincing, appalling, even to his Irish
Colleagues.

"Listen," a lieutenant named Cassidy said to him.
He was thin-skinned and red-faced, the veins crawling over his big nose like a
network of rivers. "It's human to be prejudiced. But Jeez, this Hitler guy
is going too far."

"Yeah," Bernie responded, thinking to himself
that this big mick would be the first in line if a home-grown-variety dictator
came to power.

He had tried to enlist, but was turned down because of flat
feet and a bad back. Oddly, the war had had a negative effect on his career. As
soon as the men returned from the war, many of them younger than himself, they
were given preference for the better jobs within the department, a condition
that only fed his distrust of his superiors.

"Now they don't have to make up excuses. They
apologize and tell me that they got to give preference to veterans. I say
bullshit to that. It's the same as before."

Finally, even Mildred began to agree with him. What other
reason could there be for her Bernie to have remained a patrolman all these
years?

"I was right, Mildred," he would say
emphatically, knowing that he had her agreement.

"Maybe someday it'll get better."

"Never."

Bernie Bromberg believed this most emphatically in his
soul, even when Israel was first created by the United Nations.

"The bastards won't let 'em live," he said to his
confused police colleagues who observed the international situation with half
an ear. It was, of course, after those atrocity pictures had appeared and
people had stared at them in disbelief.

"The goyim secretly like it," Bernie Bromberg had
observed.

And when all of the Arab states attacked the young state of
Israel right after the United Nations decree, he had shrugged.

"Who didn't know that was coming?"

Yet Israel survived that onslaught and the one in 1956, but
it wasn't until the Six Day War that even Bernie Bromberg wavered in his belief
that the Jews were put on the earth to be kicked around by the goyim. He
reveled in the jokes his fellow cops were telling about the Arabs and their
laughable military prowess and, for a brief time, enjoyed the respect he had
found.

"You people are great fighters," the boys at the
precinct house would say, filling him with pride as he thought how confusing it
must be to them. After all, he was an American, he told himself, not an
Israeli, although he only half-believed that. He was a Jew. That's the way the
goyim felt about it and that's the way he felt about it.

"If you were forced to make a choice between the United States and Israel, which country would you fight for?" he had been asked one day by his
partner as they sat at a lunch counter eating cheese sandwiches. He had been
asked that question many times.

"I am an American," he said.

"You'd fight against your own kind?"

"I'm an American," he said, and swallowed hard,
wondering if he would really make that kind of choice.

For a while at least, he could mark the Six Day War as a
turning point in the way he, personally, was treated by his fellow cops. By
then he had accepted his fate and was determined to sit out his pension. He had
grown so accustomed to the code words and subterfuges that he imagined were
standard practice that it hardly bothered him as much when someone called him a
white Jew or talked about "you people" or "your kind." Even
"Jew bastard" didn't inflame him any more, and he imagined that terms
like "sheeny, yid, kike, hebe" had become outdated since he heard
them less and less often. But, despite the pride and his new-found respect, he
distrusted it in his heart.

"It's only temporary," he said. His children were
grown by that time and his obstinate belief in the inevitability of Jewish
persecution and the avowed goal of the goyim to kill all the Jews became an
object of ridicule.

"You're paranoid," his son would say. "That
kind of thinking is yesterday's dishwater."

"Wait," Bernie would tell him.

"You sound like a Jewish mother's joke."

"You'll see."

He had already bought his condominium at Sunset Village before the day of his retirement and Mildred had gone by herself for two weeks
to take care of the furnishing and preparing of the place for his arrival.
There was a brief retirement ceremony at the precinct. The captain made a
speech and a little joke, not without its Jewish references. Everybody laughed
politely and he gathered up things in his locker and left the precinct house
after shaking hands all around. Some of the fellows with whom he had served had
tears in their eyes, but he wondered if they were crying for him or for
themselves.

In Sunset Village, he rarely saw anyone who wasn't Jewish,
and to find validation of his theories about Jewish destruction he read the
newspapers avidly, looking for further evidence of what he believed. It was
everywhere, it seemed to him, and growing worse. The Soviet Union was now actively
persecuting Jews.

"I could have told those damned Jewish Reds back in
the thirties," he would say to all who would listen. And, always, there
would be confirmation in the response. He saw evidence of anti-Semitism
everywhere. When the King of Jordan came to Washington, and the President
entertained him, he was certain that some deal would be struck to the
disadvantage of the Jews. Even when a top official of Israel was being entertained at the White House, he would remark:

"They're buttering him up for the kill."

But the apogee of his confirmation came in 1973. He could
not believe what he was hearing at first, then he calmly accepted what had
happened as absolute evidence of the further proof of his concept.

"I can't believe it's happening," people would
say during those traumatic weeks. The atmosphere in Sunset Village was gloomy. Nobody smiled. Everybody seemed depressed, as if the Arabs would be
attacking Sunset Village shortly and this were the calm before the storm.

"What do you mean you can't believe it?" Bernie
Bromberg would say.

"You'd think that after all we've been through they'd
leave us alone."

"Why should they do that?" he would say with some
authority, while the others around him would shrug in agreement.

"Then what's the solution?" someone would ask.

He had by then decided that the only solution was the one
he had employed on the young thug who had beat up the old Jew in Greenwich Village many years ago. He thought often about this incident, but in his mind the
act of circumcision actually occurred. In the fantasy of the act, there was no
longer any revulsion or regret.

"I was a tough New York cop," he told his new
cronies when they sat around the pool or in the clubhouse playing cards.
"And believe me, force is the only language they understand."

"So what's the solution?"

"Action," he said smugly, feeling his pulse
quicken and enjoying his role as spokesman.

"Like the Jewish Defense League?" someone asked.

"Exactly."

"They're not too radical?"

"Not radical enough," Bernie said. He could feel
a wave of admiration wash over him.

"Somebody should start a chapter here," someone
said.

Bernie would have been hard put to recount how it actually
came about, but soon after the Arab oil embargo, a unit had been formed and he
had been elected head of it. Someone had written to Rabbi Kahane, the national
director of the JDL, and he had come down and spoken to them. Bernie Bromberg
had made the inroductions, and his name was mentioned in the Sunset Village paper, giving him for the first time in his life a great sense of pride and
purpose. When he walked through the neatly clipped paths, people seemed to
notice who he was, smiling in greeting, and he was never without his
"Never Again" button.

Thirty men, all in their early to middle seventies, had
become members of Bernie Bromberg's chapter of the Jewish Defense League. They
met weekly in one of the all-purpose rooms in the clubhouse and Bernie would
preside and read them clippings from the newspapers to illustrate how terrible
the new persecution was becoming, how the Soviets were stepping up their
harassment of Jews and how the Americans and the rest of the world were selling
out Israel.

Someone had even made a crude sign, which was thumbtacked
to the wall and read: "Secret Session. Members Only." Most of the
other people in Sunset Village snickered when they passed the meeting room.

"This is a Jewish CIA?" a kibitzer might say,
but, for the most part, Bernie ignored the ridicule. He was used to it. They
were cowards, he told himself. They were the kind of Jews that went like sheep
to the cattle cars and concentration camps and gas chambers.

He could not understand why more of his neighbors did not
rush to join his militant outfit, content instead to spend their time playing
cards, sitting idly by the pool, or watching the shows every night in the
clubhouse. He also could not understand why they chose to belong to other
Jewish organizations, like B'nai B'rith, Hadassah, the American Jewish
Congress, and the American Jewish Committee. They were in a war for survival.
He knew this. Anyone with a modicum of sense could see what was happening.

"We are the cutting edge," he told his group at
their regular meetings. "The rest of our people are asleep. The final
battle to kill the Jews is now under way." He would urge them to
proselytize, spread the word, make the others understand. He was, of course,
the most vocal, the most argumentative.

"You're making me a laughingstock," Mildred told
him one day. "Why do you have to go around so angry? If they don't agree
with you, you yell at them. You know what they're saying?"

"I don't care."

"They're saying: 'Here comes Bernie Bromberg. Watch
out.... If you don't join his army he'll have you shot.'"

"Who cares?"

"I care. I don't like going around and hearing that my
husband is crazy."

"One morning they'll wake up and see that I'm
right."

"Maybe," Mildred said gently, patting her
husband's arm. "But in the meantime, they're a bunch of old broken-down
retired Jews. They may even agree with you, but now they want peace, a little
fun, a little relaxation."

"They must not relax."

"Bernie. They're old people. We're old people."

"And the children?"

"You want to make me feel guilty about the
children?"

"We are fighting their battle."

She looked at him and shook her head.

"Poor Bernie," she said.

"Poor all of us."

After about a year the membership of Bernie's unit
dwindled. The negotiations in the Middle East seemed to be a long-drawn-out
affair, and, aside from the Soviet persecutions, there was nothing particularly
dramatic on which to focus.

"The meetings are getting boring, Bernie," one of
the members told him one day. "You know I'm with you one hundred percent.
But all we do is talk. We don't do anything."

Bernie listened patiently to his friend's admonition. The
fact was that the real action was in New York at the United Nations, or in Washington in front of the White House. What could they do in Florida, in Poinsettia Beach? He thought about that for a long time. The membership had dwindled by then to
ten men.

"We're still a minyan," he would tell them,
"a nucleus."

But he was worried about the indifference of his fellow
Jews. He could not believe they could not see what was as clear as the nose on
their faces. When he walked toward a group, they scattered like frightened
birds. What he needed to do, he decided, was something so dramatic that they
would have to stand up and take notice.